Between passivity and barbarism standsthe sustaining power of
ritual
After two terrifying weeks in the hospital, I needed to recuperate.
So when a colleague offered me the use of his mountain-top retreat in his
absence, I jumped at the chance. Here perched a tranquil place nursed by
the motions of a river and the pines, maples, and honeynuts bordering it,
where I might constructively begin the transition back to ordinary life.
Nature would help the healing, keep stress down, and allow me to catch up
with the world, again. That was the plan.
Instead of bathing in actual peace and harmony up there on the
magic mountain, however, I found myself in the thick of a domestic blood
feud, a state of affairs triggered principally by the high testosterone
levels of two male dogs.
The threat of these dogs fighting initially led me back to the
classic work of Konrad Lorenz, the great Austrian animal behaviorist who
had shared in the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology in 1973.
Lorenz, best-known for his controversial book, On Aggression, was one of
the founders of ethology, a science that combines psychology and biology.
But as I reread an interview with Lorenz conducted in Psychology Today in
1974, 1 realized he had raised in his book a great many relevant
questions about more than just animal behavior.
These were some of the universal questions about violence between
individuals and groups-including humans-that, almost 20 years later, seem
to have come urgently around again, begging for answers.
But let me first set the stage and explain why my convalescence
became so punctuated by the specter of aggresssion, both real and
symbolic.
As a condition of my stay in that mountain aerie, I had agreed to
dog-sit Max, the house-owner's golden retriever-a lumbering, boisterous
adolescent with big paws and a loping gait. The trouble lay in the fact
that I needed to bring my own dog, Quincy- also a male golden-slightly
more retiring and unfixed, but several years senior and, like me, growing
gray in the muzzle.
As confirmed by several previous meetings, these two dogs hated one
another ... passionately. Forget what animal behaviorists say about
humans comprising one of the few species regularly inclined to kill its
own kind. Given the chance, Max and Quincy would fight to the death. Of
this my friend and I both stood convinced, having more than once risked
our own skins by coming between their slashing teeth.
That's not the way it's supposed to be. For, according to standard
ethological theory-and Lorenz-actual death rarely ensues from such
encounters in the wild, not even among wolves. Instead, it is assumed
that once one of the canids establishes dominance, the weaker one submits
and the fight ends. The hierarchical ranking between the two then tends
to stay fixed afterward, allowing the rest of the pack to go about its
business of eating and reproducing.
But why even let matters between Max and Quincy reach that
confrontational stage and risk the pitched battle huge veterinarian
bills? Frankly, their enmity appeared so deep and encompassing that I
feared they wouldn't stop short of killing each other.
At the same time that I was trying to formulate a plan of peaceful
co-existence for these unremitting enemies, I couldn't avoid dwelling on
news of other, non-canid enemies. Serbs continued to murder Bosnians-and
vice versa-while, at home, the infighting in the presidential race was
getting down and dirty: one of the contestants was embarking on a program
of character assasination, the other dodging and parrying like a
prize-fighter (while simultaneously getting in a few pretty good licks of
his own).
What did these different forms of aggression have in common, if
anything?
The answer lies in ritual.
In the Psychology Today interview, Lorenz described typical
encounters of individual aggression and connected animal behavior with
people behavior: "If you put together two little boys, two fish of one
species, two roosters, two monkeys, they will behave exactly as Mark
Twain describes a meeting between Tom Sawyer and a new boy. The first
words Tom says are, 'I can lick you,' and the inevitable fight ends just
as soon as one boy hollers 'Nuff!' It's not a drive to kill another
person, but the drive to lick him into submission. It has to do with rank
order or territory, and not with a killing instinct' "
That seemed to explain the behavior of wild dogs and America's
traditional adversarial politics, to a point. It's more or less
one-on-one, with status the issue and territory the stake. Nobody gets
killed directly, even though there's a lot of growling and baring of
teeth.
In the case of politics, such posturing often reaches a pitch that
is both alarming and wearisome-a combination of low blows for the enemy
and adulation for the self. If it weren't for the fact that the country's
economic future hinges on the outcome, no one in his or her right mind
would pay attention to such shenanigans, (which seems to be the case with
most of the electorate anyway, judging from the number who regularly
don't vote).
Still, you do not have to be a DeTocqueville or an anthropologist
to recognize that presidential politics, like all political contests, is
a ritual form of combat, with the control of power and money hanging in
the balance, affecting life and death more intimately than we often care
to acknowledge. But at least it is more ritualistic than real in this
country-since the Civil War, at any rate.
Tags:
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high testosterone levels,
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male dogs,
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ordinary life,
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ritual,
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