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Peacemaking among higher-order primates
Abstract
Facts are facts. Opinions about the facts differ. It is therefore the job of the peacemaker to bridge the gap between opinions, and in that manner, bring about reconciliation. This much seems obvious. But what if the facts themselves differ? What if the basis for the disagreement is so profound that the world arrays itself differently for each antagonist – and worse: what if the disagreement extends beyond the antagonist, to the peacemaker, who sees the facts themselves in a manner that neither antagonist can accept? What then? Ridiculous, surely: how can the facts themselves differ, when it is one world that we all inhabit? But the facts do differ, because the world is complex beyond the scope of any one interpretation. For this reason, there can be disagreement about first principles, as well as their derivatives. This means that the job of the peacemaker is to establish an accord that allows the facts themselves to become a matter of agreement. To do that, however, the peacemaker has to be able to see the facts that lead to peace. To do that, he has to be more than a pragmatic broker of opinions. He has to be a man of deep and profoundly rooted morality – and a man of the morality of no man's land, instead of the morality of established territory. No man's land is the unknown, terra incognita. The morality of the previously established is merely a matter of tradition, agreed upon by all. When traditions clash, however, the facts themselves are no longer self-evident. Under such conditions, it is only the individual who has traveled strange lands who can build a bridge. But to travel strange lands is to risk coming under the dominion of the terrible spirits that inhabit the uninhabitable; to risk becoming the strange son of chaos – someone no longer acceptable to those who still dwell quietly at home. To travel strange lands is to see the broader territory, the no man's land surrounding all conditional moralities, and to learn how to negotiate a path there – but also to lose all belief that there is one way, or one set of facts.
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Memory is vulnerable, easily distorted to fit beliefs and modes of action that are more expedient than accurate. When the process of remembering becomes collective, such distortion may be greatly increased. Collective memories are acquired and transmitted in a social context, and are therefore the modifiable property of many people (De La Ronde & Swann, 1998; Hardin & Higgins, 1996; Rosenthal & Rubin, 1978; Snyder, 1974). The tendency towards social modification, which can serve positively to unite the members of a group, has a very negative, dangerous, underground aspect. Individuals appear somewhat constrained in their willingness to inflict destruction (or at least in the power to do so). Groups of individuals are not. The dangers of self-deception about past events, far from trivial in the personal case, are tremendously magnified in the social arena. The careless use of memory can lead directly to the grave abuse of people.
The amine serotonin has been suggested to play a key role in aggression in many species of animals, including man. Precisely how the amine functions, however, has remained a mystery. As with other important physiological questions, with their large uniquely identifiable neurons, invertebrate systems offer special advantages for the study of behavior. In this article we illustrate that principal with a description of our studies of the role of serotonin in aggression in a lobster model system. Aggression is a quantifiable behavior in crustaceans, the amine neuron systems believed to be important in that behavior have been completely mapped, and key physiological properties of an important subset of these netirons have been defined. These results are summarized here, including descriptions of the "gain-setter" role and "autoinhibition" shown by these neurons. Results of other investigations showing socially modulated changes in amine responsiveness at particular synaptic sites also are described. In addition, speculations are offered about how important developmental roles served by amines like serotonin, which have been well described by other investigators, may be related to the behaviors we are examining. These speculations draw heavily from the organizational/activational roles proposed for steroid hormones by Phoenix et al. (1959).
presents a model of the behavioral functions and information processing discharged jointly by the limbic system (especially the hippocampal formation and amygdala) and the basal ganglia (both the dorsal and ventral striatal systems) / in general terms, the limbic system plus basal ganglia act as a mechanism for the attainment of goals / the sensory aspects of this overall goal-direction function (recognition of goals and evaluation of the outcomes of action) are dealt with in the limbic system; the motor aspects (establishment and execution of motor programs) in the basal ganglia / the model is applied to an understanding of the neuropsychology of anxiety and schizophrenia, especially the positive symptoms of the latter (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
It is not clear that either the categories "given" to us by our senses, or those abstracted for us by the processes of scientific investigation, constitute the most "real" or even the most "useful" modes of apprehending the fundamental nature of being or experience. The categories offered by traditional myths and religious systems might play that role. Such systems of apprehension present the world as a place of constant moral striving, conducted against a background of interplay between the "divine forces" of order and chaos. "Order" is the natural category of all those phenomena whose manifestations and transformations are currently predictable. "Chaos" is the natural category of "potential" - the potential that emerges whenever an error in prediction occurs. The capacity for creative exploration - embodied in mythology in the form of the "ever-resurrecting hero" - serves as the mediator between these fundamental constituent elements of experience. Voluntary failure to engage in such exploration - that is, forfeit of identification with "the worldredeeming savior" - produces a chain of causally interrelated events whose inevitable endpoint is adoption of a rigid, ideology-predicated, totalitarian identity, and violent suppression of the eternally threatening other.
As reptiles, snakes may have signified deadly threats in the environment of early mammals. We review findings suggesting that snakes remain special stimuli for humans. Intense snake fear is prevalent in both humans and other primates. Humans and monkeys learn snake fear more easily than fear of most other stimuli through direct or vicarious conditioning. Neither the elicitation nor the conditioning of snake fear in humans requires that snakes be consciously perceived; rather, both processes can occur with masked stimuli. Humans tend to perceive illusory correlations between snakes and aversive stimuli, and their attention is automatically captured by snakes in complex visual displays. Together, these and other findings delineate an evolved fear module in the brain. This module is selectively and automatically activated by once-threatening stimuli, is relatively encapsulated from cognition, and derives from specialized neural circuitry.
What are the neural bases of action understanding? Although this capacity could merely involve visual analysis of the action, it has been argued that we actually map this visual information onto its motor representation in our nervous system. Here we discuss evidence for the existence of a system, the 'mirror system', that seems to serve this mapping function in primates and humans, and explore its implications for the understanding and imitation of action.