Volume 11, Number 6 · October 10, 1968
Ignoble Savages
By Edmund R. Leach
Human Aggression
by Anthony Storr
Atheneum, 127 pp., $5.00
Sanity and Survival: Psychological Aspects of War and Peace
by Jerome K. Frank
Random House, 330 pp., $5.95
Non-Violence and Aggression: A Study of Gandhi's Moral Equivalent of War
by H.J.N. Horsburgh
Oxford, 207 pp., $5.60
Violence in the Streets
edited by Shalom Endleman
Quadrangle Books, 471 pp., $10.00
War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression
edited by Morton Fried, edited by Marvin Harris, edited by Robert Murphy
American Museum of Natural History Press, 262 pp., $6.95
These books are all concerned with violence as a form of human behavior, but they cover a very wide spectrum ranging from personal subliminal tendencies at one extreme to nuclear warfare at the other. It is quite impossible for a reviewer to treat the various arguments with equal justice, but I will start with a brief summary of what they are: Item 1 is short, lucid, and persuasive. Storr brings an amateur's understanding of ethology to his professional psychoanalytical conviction that aggression is a necessary component of human nature. Salvation can only come through sublimation, and the space race to the moon, far from being a waste of money, is much to be preferred to letting off the Bomb. Item 2 is likewise psychoanalytic but is more diffuse. Frank writes as if international politics were no more complicated than a game of tic tac toe. If generals and politicians make mistakes this must be because of psychological defects in their personality, so closer psychological understanding of the motives of leaders will solve all our problems. What terrifies me about this particular author is the way he keeps making confident simplicist predictions about situations of the utmost complexity. 'If the world has not destroyed itself first, it is certain to move eventually to an economy of affluence in which there will be plenty of goods for everyone.'
Review, 4932 words
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