In 1933, Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote this about his strategy of nonviolent activism, which he called the law of love: "The law will work just like the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not."
I think he was right. History, from ancient China and the early Christians all the way up to the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa, shows that it does work. You would think that after Gandhi's uprising in India, and after the civil rights movement in a violent and hateful American South, no one would ever again doubt that fact. And yet, even today, the most common response to nonviolence, as though it has never been tried, is, "Nice idea, but will it work?"
These days, in fact, a lot of people, including some biologists, have been leaning toward a scientific explanation for why violence refuses to go away. Their argument is that human beings have a natural predilection for aggression, war and bloodshed, and that nonviolence, appealing as it may be, is completely contrary to our nature.
In biology, a field in which there is little agreement about anything, there is a growing opinion that "group conflict" has been a determining factor in the evolutionary development of numerous species, including us. Biologists prefer the term "group conflict" -- one group fighting with another -- to "warfare" because some of the geopolitical calculations of warfare are beyond what they would call natural. But still, there is a growing belief that we feel threatened instinctively and that it is in our nature to act aggressively toward other groups.
Edward O. Wilson, a leading Harvard biologist, goes even a little further, suggesting that human beings developed some of their most admirable traits -- such as courage and self-sacrifice and possibly even intelligence -- from warfare. This idea (first suggested by Charles Darwin in 1871 in "The Descent of Man") has never been widely accepted. Wilson predicts that it will catch on.
"I'm sorry to say," Wilson told me in his Harvard office, "that it would appear entirely possible that not only is group conflict -- and all that goes with it that can flare up into violence -- natural, but that we're hard-wired for it."
Wilson, an entomologist specializing in ants, rejects the view that the institutional self-slaughter we call warfare is unique to the human species. "Ants are the most violent creatures on Earth," Wilson said. "They're always at war. If you want to see an ant war, take a colony, pick it up and move it next to another colony, and pretty soon you'll see a full-scale war. I like to say if ants had nuclear weapons, the world would end in a week."
