Title: Fukuyama's Follies. Subject(s): FUKUYAMA, Francis; VIOLENCE -- Sex differences; AGGRESSIVENESS (Psychology) -- Sex differences; WOMEN & war; WAR Source: Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb99, Vol. 78 Issue 1, p118, 12p, 2bw Author(s): Ehrenreich, Barbara; Pollitt, Katha; Abstract: Presents essays on the ideas promoted by Francis Fukuyama. Males being more prone to violence than females; Women warriors and guerrilla fighters; War coming from social and cultural pressures rather than from any genetic male tendency toward violence; Women's competitiveness; Militarism and foreign policy; Aggressive young men, chimp behavior, and biological tendencies; Women, social control, and leadership. AN: 1417622 ISSN: 0015-7120 Full Text Word Count: 5204 Database: Academic Search Premier Notes: The Lamson Library subscribes to this Journal Section: Responses FUKUYAMA'S FOLLIES Contents MALE RITES WOMEN WARRIORS MACHO MAN EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY IS BUNK WHY THE DRAFT? VOTERS DON'T MAKE FOREIGN POLICY So What if Women Ruled the World? MEN HATE WAR TOO Barbara Ehrenreich Francis Fukuyama marshals the familiar evidence suggesting that males, in our species and others, are more prone to violence than females ("Women and the Evolution of World Politics," September/October 1998). Despite the current academic bias against "essentialist" or genetic explanations of behavior, this evidence shows that males are indeed more likely to fight, murder, loot, pillage, and, of course, rape than females. The question remains, however, whether this apparently innate male predilection has much to do with the subjects that concern Fukuyama -- war, international relations, and politics. If Fukuyama had read just a bit further in the anthropology of war, even in the works of some scholars he cites approvingly, he would have discovered that there is little basis for locating the wellspring of war in aggressive male instincts -- or in any instincts, for that matter. Wars are not barroom brawls writ large, but, as social theorist Robin Fox puts it, "complicated, orchestrated, highly organized" collective undertakings that cannot be explained by any individual impulse. No plausible instinct would impel a man to leave his home, cut his hair short, and drill for hours under the hot sun. As anthropologists Clifton B. Kroeber and Bernard L. Fontana have pointed out, "It is a large step from what may be biologically innate leanings toward individual aggression to ritualized, socially sanctioned, institutionalized group warfare." Or as a 1989 conference on the anthropology of war concluded, "The hypothesis of a killer instinct is . . . not so much irrelevant as wrong." In fact, the male appetite for battle has always been far less voracious than either biologically inclined theorists of war or army commanders might like. In traditional societies, warriors often had to be taunted, intoxicated, or ritually "transformed" into animal form before battle. Throughout Western history, individual men have gone to near-suicidal lengths to avoid participating in wars -- cutting off limbs or fingers or risking execution by deserting. Prior to the advent of the nationalist armies of the nineteenth century, desertion rates in European armies were so high that, according to historian Geoffrey Parker, "at certain times, almost an entire army would vanish into thin air." So unreliable was the rank and file of the famed eighteenth-century Prussian army that military manuals forbade camping near wooded areas. Even in the supposedly highly motivated armies of the twentieth-century democracies, few men can bring themselves to shoot directly at individual enemies -- a fact, as Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman writes in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, that has posed a persistent challenge to the Pentagon. MALE RITES Fortunately, we need not resort to instinctual male aggressiveness to explain the male near-monopoly on warfare. One reason is clearly biological, resting on men's advantage in upper body strength -- an undeniable plus when the weapons of war are heavy swords, spears, pikes, maces, or clubs. Another explanation is cultural, or at least as purely cultural as one can be: In many, if not most, human societies, male initiation rites feature acts of violence committed by or on the initiates, and one of the most common of these rites has been participation in battle. Through "blooding his spear" a boy proved his manhood (or through ordering the bombing of some smaller nation, in the case of recent American presidents). For an activity to be a male initiatory rite, it cannot, of course, be open to women and girls. Hence the widespread taboos on female handling of weapons and, in many cases, the tools of peaceable male-dominated crafts. But there is no reason to think that such initiatory activities derive from instinctual male proclivities. In some cultural settings, the young male's initiation to the adult world may be entirely bloodless, featuring the receipt of a diploma or admission into a guild. In others it may be violent in ways not related to war, involving circumcision, homosexual rape, or nose-bleeding induced with sharp sticks --activities few would claim are instinctually driven. In fact, the very purpose of male initiation rites is to distinguish biological maleness, which undoubtedly includes a healthy desire for self-preservation, from cultural manhood, which requires a certain amount of self-discipline and even self-sacrifice for the group (as does cultural womanhood). WOMEN WARRIORS Nor can it be assumed that the male monopoly on warfare has been as eternal and universal as Fukuyama imagines. Gravesites recently excavated in Russia contain the remains of women warriors from the second millennium B.C. -- female skeletons buried with weapons and bearing wounds inflicted by similar weapons. The victims of the Neolithic massacre at Jebel Sahaba, mentioned by Fukuyama, included both women and men, and there is no evidence that the perpetrators were exclusively male. Moving back into the Paleolithic Age, when hunting was probably the principal form of human violence, growing archaeological evidence suggests that it was a communal enterprise in which women and children joined men in driving herds over cliffs or into nets or culs-de-sac. Thus, Fukuyama overstates the case when he says that "men [unlike women] have clearly evolved as cooperative hunters and fighters." The male-centered hunting strategy that figured so prominently in the writings of sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s --in which a small band of men stalks an individual animal -- may be a rather recent innovation, necessitated by declining game populations in the Mesolithic Age. Myths of ancient civilizations also throw doubt on Fukuyama's assertions. Some of the earliest deities worshipped by humans were female, but they were hardly the nurturing earth mothers imagined by many scholars. The archaic goddesses unearthed from Mediterranean and Mesopotamian ruins or recalled in Mesoamerican mythology were huntresses and avid consumers of blood sacrifices, often accompanied or represented by predators such as lions and leopards. Only later were these terrifying deities "tamed" through marriage to patriarchal male gods and reassigned to agricultural duties. Although the characteristics of the archaic goddesses tell us nothing about the roles of actual women, they do suggest a time when the association of manhood with violence and femininity with gentleness was not as self-evident as it has seemed in the modern age. MACHO MAN Whatever our genetic and prehistoric cultural legacies, women in the past two centuries have more than adequately demonstrated a capacity for collective violence. They have played a leading role in nonmilitary violence such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bread riots and revolutionary uprisings, in which they were often reputed to be "foremost in violence and ferocity." In World War II, the Soviet military deployed them as fighter pilots and in ground combat. Since then, women have served as terrorists and guerrilla fighters in wars of national liberation. More to the point, women have proved themselves no less susceptible than men to the passions of militaristic nationalism: witness feminist leader Sylvia Pankhurst, who set aside the struggle for suffrage to mobilize English support for World War I by, for example, publicly shaming men into enlisting. Fukuyama concedes that, among heads of government, Margaret Thatcher is an exception to his gender dichotomy but ignores the many exceptions on the male side of the ledger -- such as the antimilitaristic, social-democratic Olaf Palme and Willy Brandt. Nor does he mention the gender of the greatest pacifist leaders of the twentieth century, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mohandas K. Gandhi. But perhaps Fukuyama would concede all of the above, for in the end he has little use for his own dubious claims about the inherent aggressiveness of men and niceness of women. Up until the last three pages of his essay, one might assume that he was gearing up to demand solely masculine leadership, if not participation, in the arenas of politics and war. But no. Women in the military? His only objection has to do with sex as an activity rather than a category, which leads him to the mild suggestion that men and women should be segregated into separate combat units. As for political leadership, he worries a little that the female, and hence over-kindly, heads of state who arise in the northern democracies will be a poor match for the macho young males whom he expects to dominate the south. But even here he quickly backtracks, admitting, "Masculine policies will be still be required, though not necessarily masculine leaders." If, as Fukuyama concludes, either sex can be "masculine" in both admirable and execrable ways, what is the point of his essay, with its lengthy excursion into the supposedly murderous habits of cavemen and chimps? Perhaps Fukuyama is right about one thing: Whatever the innate psychological differences between the sexes, a certain male propensity for chest-thumping persists, and can be found among desk-dwelling American scholars as well as alpha apes. Barbara Ehrenreich is an author and lecturer whose essays have appeared frequently in Time, The Nation, and The Guardian. Her most recent book is Blood Rites. FATHER KNOWS BEST Katha Pollitt In his 1989 essay "The End of History?" Fukuyama argued that liberal capitalist democracy was the final stage of political organization toward which the whole world was tending. Today, it seems clear that history will continue to occur, fueled by familiar energies --nationalism, religious mania, the will to power of powerful men, drastic inequalities between and within nations, economic cycles of boom and bust. Undaunted, Fukuyama is back with another idea. He prophesies that the increasing political power of women in wealthy Western countries will incline those countries against war because evolution has made violence, aggression, and status competition hardwired components of male, but not female, nature. As with chimpanzees, so with humans: >From rival male chimps tearing each other to pieces it is but a step to the famously violent Yanomamo of the Amazon, and before we know it we are on familiar twentieth-century killing grounds -- the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia. But Fukuyama warns that this female peacefulness poses dangers to the West. Other parts of the world where female infanticide and sex-selective abortion result in heavily male populations will become more pugnacious. Are Western women up to the challenge of a testosterone-saturated Asia? And what about women in the army? If men are genetically destined to bond only with other men and to compete perpetually for females, will coed army units degenerate into Peyton Place in camouflage? In arguing for his story of things to come, Fukuyama strays all over the ideological map. He draws on "evolutionary psychologists" to portray men as the main source of human violence, but he ignores those theorists' other claim that male dominance and female acceptance thereof are permanent features of human nature. He mocks radical feminists for dreaming that men can be socialized to be more humane, but he simultaneously imagines that these same unreformable men will simply let women steer the ship of state into tranquil waters. He projects into the future current practices that fit his vision, without acknowledging the possibility that those practices may change. Is it so obvious that Asians will still be aborting female fetuses in 20 years after a generation of pampered sons has been unable to find wives? Are we so sure that Europe and Japan, faced with rapidly aging populations, will just grow gray in a corner? Perhaps these wrinkled nations will become more immigration-friendly, like the United States. Indeed, France, Italy, and Spain are already experiencing enormous pressure as illegal immigration from eastern Europe and Africa increases. The new German government has just loosened citizenship requirements, suggesting that xenophobia is not the only response to demographic change. EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY IS BUNK So what is wrong with Fukuyama's argument? Just about everything. First, he argues that science has discovered the genetic roots of human behavior. This is quite untrue; "evolutionary psychology" is just a theory. It is certainly not the case that "hardly a week goes by without the discovery of a gene linked to a disease, condition, or behavior," although it is indeed true that hardly a week goes by without someone claiming to have discovered such a gene. No one would dispute that diseases can have genetic components, but behaviors? The much-publicized "alcoholism gene" turned out not to exist, which should make Fukuyama cautious about such sweeping statements. In fact, no single gene has ever been discovered that by itself determines a human social behavior; it is a long way from cystic fibrosis to marital infidelity. And it has not even begun to be demonstrated that a complex piece of human behavior like violence or competition could boil down to X or Y chromosomes. Evolutionary psychologists' theories are popular with the media, which love stories that suggest feminists are barking up the wrong tree and that gender equality is a doomed project. But Fukuyama is wrong to suggest that evolutionary psychology has won the day in science. Fukuyama tends to name the people he agrees with while referring only vaguely and condescendingly to opponents ("radical feminists," "many feminists," "postmodernists"). But Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and many other scientists make formidable arguments, grounded not in ideology but in biology, against genetic determinism. It is not encouraging that Fukuyama seems unfamiliar with their work. He argues that men are more violent than women. Someday he may provide actual evidence that this is a biological rather than social tendency. But even if women are innately less violent, they are plenty violent enough to call into question Fukuyama's claim that more female political power would mean more peace. Women commit infanticide, abuse and kill children, mutilate the genitals of little girls, and cruelly tyrannize daughters, daughters-in-law, servants, and slaves. They have also been known to encourage and defend male violence -- egging on personal, family, or gang vendettas, blaming the victims of rape and wife-beating, and so on. Historically, cultures organized around war and displays of cruelty have had women's full cooperation: Spartan and Roman women were famed for their "manly" valor. Did Viking women stand on Scandinavian beaches begging their husbands not to pillage France? Did premodern European women shun public executions and witch burnings? As these examples suggest, even defining violence raises questions: The same act can be regarded as wrong, psychopathic, glorious, or routine, depending on its social context. When it comes to organized state violence -- war, executions, slavery, concentration camps, and so on -- women's pacifism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. So how can it be genetic? You might as well say that today's women explorers, world travelers, athletes, and foreign correspondents prove that women have belatedly acquired that supposedly male gene for "adventurousness." (Fukuyama has clearly never tried to get a middle-class American man to see a foreign movie or try a new cuisine.) As for his claim that group-status competition is a male characteristic -- didn't Fukuyama go to high school? Girls and women do not beat each other up as much, but they certainly do compete for status -- through clothes, money, boyfriends, popularity, sexuality, cliques, and sororities. "Keeping up with the Joneses" is a form of female competition; so is getting your child into a fancy private school; so is being a groupie or marrying a famous man. Fukuyama concedes that for his supposedly sex-linked traits, each gender falls along a bell curve and that these curves mostly overlap. This contradicts his argument that men are violent and competitive and women are not. If most men and most women fall in the middle range, it is hard to see how gender difference can carry the burden Fukuyama assigns it. WHY THE DRAFT? Fukuyama's essay's second flaw is arguing that individual qualities determine state behavior. For him, war is personal violence multiplied by the number of participants. But this is the wrong model. World War II was not fought because a lot of hotheaded young men got together and decided to invade Poland. Nor did the Holocaust take place because groups of young men were competing for status over who could murder the most Jews. War and its atrocities are organized politically, from the top, by leaders who are -- yes -- usually men. But they are generally old men who are not necessarily personally violent. In modern times they rarely fight -- Lyndon B. Johnson never personally threw prisoners of war out of helicopters. It is young men who fight, but how willingly? If war is so appealing to male genes, why has every major modern war required a draft? Why does today's army recruit by touting its vocational fringe benefits? VOTERS DON'T MAKE FOREIGN POLICY Fukuyama argues that war and foreign policy are determined by voters, who will be disproportionately female and therefore antiwar. True, women are more likely than men to oppose war -- though the difference is hardly as large as a genetic explanation suggests it should be -- but wars are not decided at the ballot box. If they were, the United States would not have entered World War I. After all, the mostly male electorate chose Woodrow Wilson, whose slogan was "He kept us out of war." In 1964, voters picked Johnson ("I seek no wider war") over the saber-rattling Barry Goldwater. Nor have subsequent military actions in Panama, Somalia, the Persian Gulf, and Sudan or secret adventures such as supporting the Contras been the subjects of popular votes. Political power is not merely or even primarily a matter of ballots or public opinion. Most Americans favor handgun control, but the National Rifle Association spends millions to make sure it never happens. In the case of war, what matters is not what the voters want but campaign contributions from defense manufacturers and others, the short-term public relations needs of presidents, or the nation's geopolitical interests as interpreted by a Henry Kissinger or a McGeorge Bundy (or a Jeane Kirkpatrick or a Madeleine Albright). Once the powers that be have decided, public opinion can always be manipulated to fall into line. Before the Gulf War, Americans were split over whether to send troops. Antiwar voices were prominently featured in the news. Once the troops were dispatched, however, the media cut off debate and soon it was yellow ribbons all around. American women have had the vote for nearly 80 years. So far, they have not even won paid maternity leave or affordable daycare, things taken for granted in other industrialized countries. In light of these failures, the assertion that women will be transforming American foreign policy anytime soon, against the will of those now in control, strikes me as a fantasy second only to the notion that genetics will bring it about. It is more likely that as women become more enmeshed in politics and business, with all their compromises and rewards, whatever modest inclination they may now possess toward nonviolent conflict resolution will be swamped by other factors: vanity, greed, fear, perceptions of national interest, lust for cheap oil. Fukuyama's article is so confused and contradictory, so lacking in real evidence and logic, that one wonders what it is really all about. Despite his professed sympathy for women's claims to fuller citizenship, he suggests no means by which to move them along. He does not, for example, urge political parties to put forward gender-balanced lists of candidates, as happens in some European countries. Indeed, the only concrete proposal Fukuyama makes is to restrict women's citizenship by limiting their military role. Women make up only 12 percent of Congress and hold only three governorships, the first two female Supreme Court justices are still on the bench, but Fukuyama is worried that the girls are about to seize power and turn the United States into an international wimp. Forget feminism, genetics, or evolution. What we have here is basically a convoluted variation on two old conservative themes: When it comes to the military, too much is not enough, and when it comes to foreign policy, father -- not mother -- knows best. Katha Pollitt is Associate Editor of The Nation. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New York Times. She is the author of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism.