pieces.

 

One interesting mental exercise is to compare Genghis Khan, who exercised

extreme, lethal hostility toward other men, with ants that display extreme,

lethal hostility toward members of their own species that are not part of their

breeding colony. Genghis looks sweetly lovable when compared to the ants. The

ants are more disposed to fight and fight with more extreme cruelty. Indeed, E.

O. Wilson once waggishly suggested that if ants were suddenly to get atom bombs,

all ants would be dead within eighteen hours. What both human and ant history

suggest is (1) that nature has no general algorithm making intraspecies,

turn-the- other-cheek behavior a booster of species survival, (2) that it is not

clear that a country would have good prospects were it to abandon all

reciprocate- disfavor tendency directed at outsiders, and (3) if

turn-the-other-cheek behavior is a good idea for a country as it deals with

outsiders, man’s culture is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting because

his genes won’t be of much help.

 

I next turn to man’s reciprocated hostility that falls well short of war.

Peacetime hostility can be pretty extreme, as in many modern cases of “road

rage” or injury-producing temper tantrums on athletic fields.

 

The standard antidote to one’s overactive hostility is to train oneself to defer

reaction. As my smart friend Tom Murphy so frequently says, “You can always tell

the man off tomorrow, if it is such a good idea.”