[QUOTE=astro]
How are you going to “solve” it? Innate male drives to conquer and possess are a large part of what drive men to achieve if properly harnessed and women often look upon men with those drives with admiration and sexual preference.
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While it is true that male aggression (if that is what you mean by “innate male drives to conquer and possess”) plays some kind of role in today’s capitalistic fortunes and sexploits, it does not have to be the main incentive for achievement and success. For example, see marshmallow’s reply below.
[QUOTE=marshmallow]
[…] In the future scientists could invent a genetic solution so the elite can enjoy the tranquility of a docile populace. Perhaps they would grow natural males for their security forces, although by that time maybe robots will be more practical.
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A eugenic solution (in the compassionate sense of eugenics, of course, which does not have to involve gas chambers) is not beyond the realm of possibility. Given how deeply the aggressive instincts are hard-wired into the male brain, it may even be the only possible solution. Einstein himself wrote to Freud on one occasion,
“Man has within himself a fust for hatred and destruction … It is a comparatively easy task to call [this passion] interplay and raise it to the power of collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only an expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve … Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?” (Einstein: A Life, Denis Brian, 232)
[QUOTE=Wesley Clark]
Intermale aggression is fundamentally about obtaining mating success. What traits you need to succeed vary from culture to culture, and I’d assume in polygamous cultures that intermale aggression is worse because many males are locked out of the mating game whereas in monogamous cultures even below average men still mate, they just mate with below average women.
If you’re born in the ghetto, you obtain status, resources and sexual access to females by being a criminal. if you’re born into the suburbs you obtain those things by going to college and getting a job (or so they told me).
So creating an environment where people’s innate desires are directed into prosocial directions is ideal. A world where men compete for status and wealth by making the world better is a better situation than one where men compete for those things by doing drive by shootings.
Supposedly crime goes up as economic inequality goes up too. I’m not sure what the connection is.
Also it declines with age. There is a reason most criminals are men in their teens and early 20s. those are prime mating years. Men are a lot less prone to crime after they hit middle age, probably because (among other things) they unconsciously know they are too old to start families.
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I find your idea of redirecting intermale aggression into pro-social behavior to be interesting, and I would not be surprised if eminent thinkers such as Richard Dawkins would agree with this view. However, I think it can be challenged on a number of points. To begin, it invites the following questions:
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Precisely how do we define “aggression”? I’ve seen it defined in some wording as “aiming to accomplish a state of affairs another creature wishes to avoid.” Clearly, this definition can be refined, but the basic idea is that in aggression, someone’s victimization is intended. If that’s how we’re defining it, then attempts at victimization must be reconciled with the concept of “making the world a better place.” Therefore…
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Under what standard of valuation are we judging the world to be better off as the result of the pro-social behaviors? The word “better” implies that two objects are being compared. Are we judging the world to be better than it was before the pro-social act was performed, or better than it would be had it not been performed? Further, how do we ascertain the effects of an individual human action, when the state of the world results from the complex sum total of all actions?
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Is intermale aggression truly “about” mating success? It is certainly the case that in the animal kingdom, males who emerge victorious tend to have more reproductive encounters. This can be formulated as an observable fact about the physical world. However, to say that intermale aggression is “about” reproductive success is to ascribe additional entities called “purposes” to human behavior, thereby introducing an apparently non-physical element. Indeed, it seems to make sex the exclusive goal of intermale aggression, when other goals (e.g., acquisition of food, or aggression for its own sake) could be equally in the mind of the aggressor. In that respect, it is similar to psychological theories in which sex is the grand aim of all human achievements (Freud et al).
The questions are admittedly technical and concerned with the finer points of language use. But they seem naturally to be the next step of inquiry if we are to get to the heart of the problem, which is, in my opinion, the suffering resulting from victimization in aggressive acts. I would like to see suffering disappear from the world altogether, but that is my own ambition and is up for debate as well.
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