Letters | 20 August 2011

Violent by nature

Sir: Amongst the sociological why-oh-why-ery trying to explain the motivation of the rioters, the simplest explanation has been overlooked: human nature is utterly violent and wicked. Conservatism — the heir of Christianity in this respect — realises this. Recent work on violence in hunter-gatherer societies has demolished sociological explanations of violence: it is not society that makes people violent but our nature, evolved over the last 100,000 years. Forty per cent of Rousseau’s ‘noble savages’ in primitive hunter-gatherer societies die at the hands of another. We are all descended from successful rapists. Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate — an attack on the idea that human nature is socially constructed — puts it very well: ‘As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose.