Prompted by the popularity of Christopher Nolan's movie based on Homer's Odyssey, the Iliad and the Odyssey have become bestselling books. Surely many of those people now reading (or rereading) Homer's epic poems will ask the one question that Homer's readers have been asking for thousands of years: Why? Why do Homer's men fight so much?
Some of the readers might also think about how this question about the male warrior culture of Homer's world can be generalized as a question about the human nature of male violence: why is it universally true--across time and across cultures--that most of the perpetrators and victims of violence are men and not women?
This is a perplexing question because male violence is so self-destructive that it seems that everyone suffers from it--everyone loses. The men in Homer's poems clearly recognize that a peaceful life--with the pleasures of home, wives, and children--is more desirable than a life of "terrible warfare" (Iliad 2.291-96, 22.64; Odyssey 6.180-85). So it's hard to understand why they don't choose to live a more peaceful life.
Of course, men like Achilles and Odysseus fight because the heroic warrior wins fame (kleos) and honor (time). But both Achilles and Odysseus weep when they think about their suffering lives (Iliad, 24.508-555; Odyssey, 8.520-585, 9.1-20). And when Odysseus sees Achilles in the underworld, Achilles tells him that he regrets his choice to die heroically and win immortal glory in the Trojan war rather than to live a long life in peace: "I would prefer to be a workman, hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, than rule as king of all the dead" (Odyssey, 11.489-492).
To the question of why they fight, Homer's men seem to answer that they have no choice--that events are beyond their control. Odysseus declares: "We are men to whom Zeus gave the fate of living through hard wars, from youth to old age, until we perish, each of us" (Iliad, 14.85-87). But this begs the question: why does Zeus give them this fate, and why do they resign themselves to this fate?
In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin's answer was what he called the "law of battle": "With savages, for instance the Australians, the women are the constant cause of war both between members of the same tribe and between distinct tribes. So no doubt it was in ancient times; nam fuit ante Helenam mulier teterrima belli causa. ['For even before Helen of Troy a woman was a most hideous cause of war.']" (627). Darwin concluded from this "that the greater size, strength, courage, pugnacity, and energy of man, in comparison with woman, were acquired during primeval times, and have subsequently been augmented, chiefly through the contests of rival males for the possession of the females" (674).
Anthropologists have studied many foraging bands and horticulturalist tribes who live by Darwin's "law of battle." For example, the Yanomami are an indigenous tribal people of the Amazonian rainforest who live as foraging horticulturalists, and they have been called the "fierce people" because 25% to 40% of all male deaths are caused by war. When anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon asked one Yanomamo man why they were always fighting, the man thought this was a ridiculous question: "What? Don't ask such a stupid question! It is women! Women! We fight over women!" (Chagnon 1979, 87). Chagnon confirmed this when he found that the most successful warriors had the largest number of offspring.
But why is it men fighting over women rather than women fighting over men? The Darwinian explanation of this was best developed by Robert Trivers in his Parental Investment Theory of sexual selection (1972). Females typically invest more in reproduction than do males, and thus the greater parental investment of the females becomes a valuable resource for the males who invest less, and consequently the males will compete among themselves for access to those females' reproductive capacity.
The difference in parental investment starts with the different sizes of the gametes. The biological definition of a female is the member of the species with larger sex cells, while the male is the member with smaller sex cells. Females have a few large and expensive eggs. Males have many small and cheap sperm. From the beginning, therefore, reproduction is usually more costly for women than for men. And once an egg is fertilized, the mother must invest in nine months of pregnancy, followed by years of feeding and rearing her offspring. Consequently, women need to be discriminating in their choice of mates--hoping to find a male willing and able to invest more in the offspring than just a sperm.
By contrast, men can attempt to produce many offspring with multiple women. But if every man attempts this, some men will succeed, and other men will not reproduce at all. It comes down to supply and demand, with a shortage of female reproductive capacity relative to male demand. As a result, men are inclined to engage in risky, even deadly, competition with other men for access to scarce female reproductive capacity. Of course, most men most of the time are not fully conscious of their being driven by violent competition with other men for reproductive success. But evolution has shaped male psychology to fight for sexual access to women and thus maximize their reproductive fitness even without men being fully aware that the ultimate goal of what they are doing is reproductive success.
That this Darwinian explanation of male violence applies to Homer's heroic ethic of masculinity is well argued by Jonathan Gottschall in his book The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (2008). That will be the topic for my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment