Humans have for eons displayed a natural inclination to defend themselves against aggression.  I suggest that this is first and foremost based upon the survival instinct -- the powerful drive to protect one's own life (as well as the lives of family members, kin-based groups, and other more distant and broadly-based groups to which people belong).  This instinct causes us to value life, to prefer to live rather than die; and we have therefore come to deem life as being inherently good and worthy of protection.  Indeed, the defense of life is among the very highest and deeply held of human values.  Quite naturally, this has entailed the development of corresponding efforts to reduce or prevent aggression:  Individuals and societies have fashioned innumerable personal and collective rules, codes of conduct, and laws in order to achieve the goal of preserving human life.  At the group level, it is easy to see that local, state, and international norms of acceptable behavior are reflected in various laws, treaties, etc., which proscribe, and often punish, aggressive conduct.

  In order that important human values may be better understood and assimilated and, further, inculcated in others, I suggest that it might be wise for people to explore the nature and causes of what could prove to be life-threatening aggression and some of the critical concomitant reactions we've developed as a consequence thereof.  Hence, this lecture attempts to provide an overview of a few select aspects of "aggression."  That there are myriad overlapping influences on and causes of aggression is indisputable.  That there are several definitions of "aggression" and its scope is also certain.  What follows merely constitutes a review of some of the basic things which your instructor deems of particular significance and in no way is intended to imply that there are not innumerable other aspects worthy of consideration.  That said, let's review what I consider among the barest of fundamentals.

    People think with the aid of categories.  We tend to form clusters and groups in our minds, and these enable us to quickly identify related objects.  A category tends to flavor everything in it with the same emotional flavor, and we form concepts based on categories and then tend to accept evidence which is consistent with and resist evidence that is contrary to our concepts.

    Based on categories, we form in-groups; and we form them at various levels. A child, for example, is generally a member of its parents' groups, has the same loyalties and is victimized the same.  Your in-groups would include these: maternal and paternal relatives, family you grew up with, your boy and/or girlhood circle, your high school classmates, church groups, drinking buddies, sports teams, profession, branch of service, sexual orientation, gender, department, political party, etc., on to city, state, religion, racial stock, and whatever.

    Our significant loyalties usually flow first to those closest to us, to others later and to a lesser degree of commitment.  (In fact, the only group that most species are willing to put ahead of the individual is the family.)  We tend to protect family, then neighborhood, then nation-state in that order.  View these as concentric circles, getting larger, becoming more inclusive in number.  It is easy to see that as the circles widen, the distance between individuals becomes greater.  There are, obviously, differences among and between groups; and, where the in-group circles are not concentric but, rather, overlap, friction and conflict often arise.  Communications can be expected to become strained.

   In-group loyalty does not necessarily imply hostility toward out-groups.  Keep well in mind that positive partisanship does not automatically breed negative prejudice, nor should it.  Nonetheless, most people tend to identify in-groups in terms of out-groups and devote considerable worry to the latter.  We tend to fear them, usually to enormous waste of time and effort.  While we have much more in common with our fellow humans around the world, we for some reason persist in focusing on and exaggerating our differences, our conflicts; and we are particularly inclined to do this in our contacts with out-groups.

   We engage in rejective behavior toward out-groups in various ways -- including verbal rejection, discrimination, and physical attack.  With respect to verbal attack, I think it is interesting to note that the more spontaneous and irrelevant the attack, the more hostility there is behind it.  When verbal attacks achieve high intensity, there is a good chance it will be transformed into more severely rejective behavior in the future.  With respect to discrimination, note that it does not occur when "we" move away from "them," but when "we" take steps to move "them" away from "us" by giving "them" unequal treatment in some way.  With respect to physical attack, please note that we can be almost certain that the following factors paved the way:
    A. A victim group is typed and its members no longer seen as individuals.
    B. There is a period of verbal complaint, where suspicion and blame become firmly rooted.
    C. Some sort of outside strain hits the in-group, such as economic difficulty or a sense of low status.
    D. The in-group members get the feeling that things are beyond their control and at this point grow tired of their own inhibitions, become irrational and explosive and grow to distrust the sciences, democracy, freedom, and even humanity itself.
    E. Organized movements attract in-groups, and vice versa.
    F. In-groups derive courage and support from their own constituencies, and wrath becomes socially approved as things get "worse" because of "them."
    G. Some precipitating incident occurs, perhaps trivial or even imaginary.
    H. Someone starts the violence, and then there is "social facilitation" -- that is, other excited people contribute to the frenzy and raise the magnitude of the violence.

  Without words it is difficult to form categories.  (Animals can do this vaguely.  For example, cats avoid small children.)  On the whole, however, we need words to help us fix our generalizations.  We use some nouns to point to readily discernible features.  These are labels of primary potency, sirens that deafen us to finer distinctions.  To label a group with a name to which we attach bad emotions consistent with suspicion of bad intent will often deprive us of the opportunity to get acquainted with its individual members.  Labels distract us from the reality of the living, complex, individuals.  (Unsavory labels, of course, apply to "them" not "us.")  When our emotions become highly aroused because an out-group has done something perceived by our in-group as "bad," we use the unsavory labels with more frequency and intensity, suspend critical judgment, and see the out-group as an undifferentiated menace.  This menace, our enemy, facilitates in-group cohesion; and loyalty to our in-group prompts us to have even more strongly held hostile feelings toward the out-group.  In turn, this makes it easier for us to view the out-group and its members as something less than human.  We can readily hate these sub-humans and be more willing to kill them.  It is my opinion that, unless people use an abundance of caution, it is such extremely hostile views toward an out-group which can make it difficult to adhere to the basic moral precepts inherent in the jus in bello requirements of just war.

  Several scholars, including Robert A. Hinde of Cambridge University in his recent article titled "The Psychological Bases of War," maintain that individual aggression is seldom an important issue in international war.  Well, yes and no.  Professor Hinde admits as much when he notes that extreme individual patriotism can swing to intense nationalism, and I suggest to you that this is the nub of a major problem the world faces today:  Tribal-nationalism has precipitated genocidal wars in Sri Lanka, southeast Asia, various parts of Africa, and throughout the middle east.  These tribalistic/nationalistic feeling are, for a variety of reasons, often exploited by other people and nations external to the tribes and nations in which the strong feelings initially developed.

  Broadly speaking, it appears to me that:
    (A) We can expect wars that are motivated by personal hatred and/or tribal-nationalism to be especially brutal to civilian populations since a primary goal will be to eradicate individuals and tribes.  Such wars are generally fought without regard to such niceties as "just war" criteria.
    (B) We can expect wars that are motivated by such noble reasons as to preserve peace by stopping an on-going war to be directed primarily at those who actually "caused" the war and to combatants.  Such wars are generally fought by nation-states that attempt to adhere to "just war" criteria.

  Complicating all this, however, is the raw fact that modern technology makes it easier to kill both combatants and civilians because they are unseen and unheard (they are remote targets, not people) and because it is technically simple to kill them.  Furthermore, as of now, today's states which tend to be motivated to go to war only reluctantly and for noble reasons are those states which have the most technologically sophisticated means with which to not only fight wars but to engage in mass slaughter, even if, as implied above, this is not intended.  However, the mere fact that states which have the power to inflict the most damage today are the same ones which use greatest caution during war should not, I suggest, inhibit those states from threatening or using force in efforts to limit or terminate wars.  Quite the contrary.  If  I'm by far the toughest guy on the block and am fundamentally motivated to act not due to hatred, greed, vanity, or such, but rather out of concern for the lives of those people being killed in an on-going war, don't I have a special duty to stop that war -- initially with a powerful effort to do so without resort to using force?

  Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, has devoted many years of study and written a great deal on the origins of violence.  Being male, I have a visceral reaction against the title of his recent book called Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Violence (1996), co-authored by Dale Peterson; however, I do think that this is a vitally important work.  Wrangham documents what appears to be a clear biological basis for male aggression in humans.  He and others, such as Matt Ridley in chapter nine ("The Source of War") in The Origins of  Virtue (1996), note that there are biological and zoological reasons why humans -- and especially males -- tend to be aggressive.  That male humans have a tendency to be much more aggressive than female humans, for whatever reason that may be, is a demonstrable fact: Males commit more crimes, especially crimes of violence.  Males engage in war significantly more often than do females.  And so on.

  In her book The Chalice and the Blade (1987), Rianne Eisler discusses  this and urges -- as Wrangham does more indirectly -- that a stronger feminine influence could help the world become a more gentle place.  When ancient Crete was "ruled" by women and thoughtful consideration of Gaia, the Earth, and peaceful goddesses prevailed, war did not exist.  Hmmm.  This is food for thought.

  Might there be some chemo-biological factor influencing aggression?  Yes, scientific studies quite clearly demonstrate that there is!  Nearly two decades ago, I urged that if we are going to test for any "drugs" we should start by testing the serotonin turnover rates in those with the authority to order others to kill people, i.e., heads of state and high-ranking military personnel.  Various recent studies compel me to reiterate this suggestion.

  Serotonin is a complex amine which is found in the body and which can be produced synthetically.  It is an important neurotransmitter substance, and its "turnover" rate (release and re-uptake by the neurons that contain it) directly and powerfully impacts on aggressive behavior.

  My colleague Michael Ofsowitz has graciously shared with me a summary of some recent research about serotonin.  What he shared with me, I now share with you:  In Biological Psychology (1998), J.T. Kalat reviews studies on mice, monkeys, and humans, which show that low serotonin turnover is involved in aggressive behaviors.  Only one study (and it was on humans) induced an agent thought to influence the turnover rate of serotonin; and this study confirmed the expected effects: Lower turnover lead to increased aggressive behaviors.  The other studies -- on mice, monkeys, and humans -- isolated individuals with lower turnover rates and found increases in aggressive behaviors in them compared to groups (within the species) with normal (higher) serotonin turnover rates.   In reviewing one study done on mice, Kalat writes, "If [Valzelli, the researcher] placed two males with low serotonin turnover together, he could count on them to fight."

  Most of the human studies cited by Kalat relied on clinical populations: prisoners and (attempted) suicide patients.  In the studies cited, there were significantly higher rates of recidivism among those subjects who had lower serotonin turnover rates.  (Note that this was all correlational evidence and  done without nonclinical controls.)  However, F.G. Moeller and colleagues have recently studied the effects of altered intake (through diet) of the amino acid tryptophan, thought to affect serotonin synthesis, on normal, i.e., nonclinical, subjects.  Moeller and his colleagues "found that young men on such a diet showed an increase in aggressive behavior a few hours after eating."

  While Moeller et al. observed that, "Neuroscientists are far from understanding the mechanisms that link low serotonin turnover to aggressive behavior," Kalat warns that a reasonable hypothesis is that "serotonin synapses inhibit actions that generally lead to unfavorable outcomes, and thus low serotonin turnover produces unrestrained, impulsive behavior."

  Does C¹⁹H²⁸O², which can be synthesized or isolated from animal testes and produced as a white crystalline substance, the male steroid sex hormone testosterone, have anything to do with aggressive tendencies?  In technical scientific parlance, that question is one we in academia refer to as a "no-brainer."  Hmmm.  But what is the empirical evidence?  Overwhelming?

  Robert Jackson stated the U.S. position on "aggression" before the Nuremberg Tribunal as follows:

[A]n "aggressor" is generally held to be that state which is the first to commit any of the following actions: (1) Declaration of war upon another State; (2) Invasion by its armed forces, with or without a declaration war, of the territory of another State; (3) Attack by its land, naval, or air forces, with or without a declaration of war, on the territory, vessels, or aircraft of another State;(4) Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection.

  United Nations resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, in the annex, defined an act of aggression as "the invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack, or any annexation by the use of force of the territory of another State or part thereof" and provided that "no consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression."  In my view, the very real threat of cyberwarfare necessitates that "aggression" be defined in terms which encompasses such a threat; and I firmly believe that international standards of conduct would allow such.

BBQ --  Buried Bonus Question: What is the definition of "aggression" according to the DOD or State?
For three CyberGoldStars be one of the first two students to answer this in an appropriately titled new main topic to WebTycho in our module on aggression.

  It is my strongly held opinion that transparency and candor can significantly reduce the threat of aggressive behavior.  I submit that this is, in general, true with respect to individuals and groups, including states.  When people and states attempt to cover up their true goals and undertake hidden agendas, it seems probable that they are up to no good.  After all, there is little reason to hide one's goals and agendas if they are good.  Of equal importance, I think, is the fact that the failure of people or states to reveal information can readily lead to disaster.

  Consider the following diagram, which is my own adaptation of the Johari Window.  Let the horizontal line L-M represent a sliding scale of "What You Know" or, in other words, "What is Revealed By Others."  Let the vertical line L-N represent a sliding scale of "What Others Know" or, in other words, "What You Reveal."  Using this model, we can visualize that as both parties become more open and reveal more, the area designated as (A) gets larger and the area designated as (D) gets smaller.  Likewise, as the parties withhold information, (A) gets smaller and (D) gets larger.  Think this over for a few moments.

                                                             L                                                                                                         M

  Significant dangers arise, I suggest, when people or states fail to be open and honest with each other.  What happens is that the arena in which to negotiate intelligently is small when communications are impaired for some reason.  Ironically, when states are on the brink of war, one thing that almost invariably happens is that diplomatic contacts are terminated.  This is precisely the moment when they are needed most.  Aggressive proclivities can hardly be ameliorated when parties are ignorant.  For these reasons, among others, I submit that transparency is a virtue to be treasured -- particularly when the going gets rough.  Transparency, as a general rule, allows us to know our perceived enemies better, understand them more, and vice versa.  The likelihood of aggression is thereby reduced.