There is a profound genetic bias for humans to learn violence. They start life fearful of strangers and we know from behavior in higher primates that strangercontact is a powerful instigator of aggression,4 particularly in crowded circumstances. Hence, efforts to know and understand other people through the development of cross-cultural exchanges and education, trade and foreign language study serve us well. Involvement by physicians in the problems of population control also works at the root causes of war.
Americans lead the world in violent television programming. Health professionals are actively and heavily involved in the attempt to reverse this and enable us to lead internationally toward the portrayal of the nonviolent resolution of conflict.4 This also is an important professional contribution to the cause of peace. In the competition for limited resources, aggression is the ingrained ultimate weapon and even in a perfect world of population control and nonviolent media there is one resource that is, in a sense, always limited to but one possessor, namely, who shall rule, whose belief shall reign. Consequently, belief systems will always be in conflict and we will never be free of the danger of mass violence. International law eventually must govern, but meanwhile we must continue to work our way around our biological and psychological propensity to war.
Beyond Beliefs
This view of belief systems suggests two interactive principles to. follow in the control of war. One insists that we squarely face the human proclivity for cruelty and destruction and that we subject proposals for remedies to critical review, looking to see that the dynamics of belief systems are accorded full recognition. The other principle, that of democracy, is necessary for the exercise of the criticism. Becker prefaces the final chapter of his great unfinished work Escape From Evil with a quote from Ricoeur: "if we can no longer live the great symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we can, we modern men, aim at a second naivete in and through criticism."23 In the service of criticism Becker praises democracy "because it . addresses itself to the problem of mystification by the free flow of selfcriticism"'" and concludes that the gauge of a truly free society would be the extent to which it admitted its own central fear of death and questioned its own system of heroic transcendence-and this is precisely what democracy is doing much of the time. This is why authoritarians always scoff at it: it seems ridiculously intent on discrediting itself. The free flow of criticism, satire, art, and science is a continuous attack on the cultural fiction.... Yet even the democratic process suffers under nuclear arms. What review does the citizenry have when war declarations provide but a few minutes' response time? It is not a democracy when our President has to have the power of a king.24 We now have the opportunity, in our second naivete but with some understanding of belief systems, to take some control of our destiny and make the world a saner place for its children.
Addendum
The strength of Freeman Dyson's new book (Weapons and Hope, New York, Harper and Row, 1984) comes from his intuitive appreciation of psychobiologic constraints. He does not develop this understanding from the new basic science of man but relies on the old concept of original sin. The power of this metaphor belongs to a former age. When interpreted with the new understanding of denial of death and pseudospeciation, his stories and morals, images and concepts, hold formidable power for the survival of civilization.
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