DRUG PROHIBITION: A PERVERTED INSTINCT?

Abstract:
Although many comparable collective irrationalities and social pathologies
were long ago laid to rest through the influence of our modern age of
science and philosophy, Drug Prohibition persists, and even flourishes in
our time as one of the great continuing instances of crowd-madness so
characteristic of pre-scientific or anti-scientific thinking. In the past
few years many writers and researchers have attempted to explain
Prohibition's great hold on us, but none of the resulting hypotheses or
theories seem sufficient to the task. With the view that a more radical and
fundamental theory of Prohibition's facilitating collective psychology is
needed I present the following ideas, more as an exploration of
possibilities and encouragement to others to augment their own thinking
rather than a suggestion that the definitive key to the phenomenon has been
found.

1 Instinctive behaviours[1] routinely exhibit what might be called the "Tex
Avery Effect". An oft-repeated gag of the master cartoonist has a story
character, when pushed down by the big bully, instantly pop up in an
unexpected location. An instinctive behaviour, if inhibited or suppressed
from expression in its normal guise, will unfailingly "pop up" as a
different or modified routine, often a strange, unprecedented, or even
perverted one.

The lowly Australian digger wasp, when its reproductive behaviour is
experimentally disturbed, will exhibit unusual variations of its
instinctive routines. The complex nest-building behaviour of many birds,
when likewise disturbed for experimental purposes, also then "pops up" as
peculiarly altered behaviours.[2] Chimpanzees and other primates often
exhibit perversely altered social behaviour when living in the stress of
unnatural confinement in zoos or experimental laboratories. These examples
are by no means exhaustive or the exception to a rule. In general,
instinctive behaviour in the animal kingdom will always find a mode of
expression despite the most disruptive interference, suppression or change
in conditions, either incidental or experimentally induced, and the more
severe or unusual the change, the more likely the resulting substitute
behaviour will be unusually or even perversely expressed.

To return to the case of our close relatives the chimpanzees and other
species of Great Apes, we find that in the wild these animals naturally
live in large, complex social groups, and evolved instinctive routines of
behaviour suitable for doing so. The complexities of such social living
have recently been shown to be far more demanding of intelligence than had
previously been surmised, and indeed, it is now strongly suspected that the
extraordinarily rapid increase in brain size during the evolution of the
several species which preceded the appearance of humans was a direct result
of natural selection satisfying the increasing demands of living in
increasingly large and complex social groups.[3]

In the classic scenario of Darwinian evolution, we know that genetic
variations that benefit the survival and reproduction of given individuals
of a species will tend to be incorporated into the permanent makeup of that
species through differentially greater reproduction by those more fit
individuals. More recently, some evolutionary biologists have come to see
that an analogous principle applies in the case of social animals and the
evolution of behaviours enabling such social living. Whatever evolving
changes would favour the survival, continuance, and reproduction not only
of individual genetic characteristics, but also of the collective
behaviours and gene-pool exhibited by the group, would become part and
parcel of the genetic and behavioural makeup of the ongoing social group.
Whether behaviour is absolutely determined by genes is still a
controversial topic, and is likely to remain so as long as the empirical
evidence connecting genes and behaviour traits remains fragmentary, but for
our purposes here it matters little how closely this determinism applies.[4]

What we may deduce from the above considerations is that many evolving
instinctive behaviour traits enabling and controlling complex social living
must have played an important role during the long period of primate
evolution preceding the appearance of the human species, and as the
complexities of social living and its demands for increasing brain size and
intelligence increased, the role of instinctive behaviours must have become
correspondingly more important and pervasive, and even to some degree
uniform across the several competing species of advanced primates.

One such universal instinctive trait, a tendency for strong and important
xenophobic behaviours,[5] would very likely have evolved as an essential
characteristic favourable for preserving the integrity of simian social
groups. Particularly important for social regulation were both individual
and collective behaviours toward animals from neighbouring territories and
the regulation of how individuals might "emigrate" to a new group. In
studies of some social ape species we find that the occasional individual
from neighbouring areas may come to live with a social group, but is
routinely accorded the lowest status and prevented from mating,
particularly with group members of higher ranking.[6] A given social group
would thus be protected not only from immediate behavioural perturbations
through an influx of "foreigners," but also the group's gene pool would be
preserved by preventing the dilution of the genetic characteristics of the
top-rank and fittest individuals by "foreign" genes. Thus through the
isolating and protective mechanisms of instinctive xenophobic behaviour
traits, social groups would have competed with each other as units under
the rubric of "survival of the fittest" as do individuals within groups,
and the evolution of social living would have had long opportunity to
develop into increasingly complex forms.

The primary importance of such xenophobic instincts for evolution can be
gauged firstly by the fact mentioned above that simian social living and
its routines were highly demanding of intelligence and highly dependent on
group stability, thus associated facilitating instincts must have been
strongly and indelibly established, playing a major role along with
intelligence and brain size in the development and maintenance of complex
social living; and secondly that such social living was itself an important
and necessary step in the evolution to more advanced primates and
eventually humankind. One may say that this period of evolution and the
necessary mechanisms which enabled it were of unparalleled importance for
the appearance of humankind.

It would seem that we have here a possible, if not probable explanation of
the origin of similar xenophobic tendencies in humans, if we can accept
that instinctive behaviours as well as obsolete morphological features tend
to linger on for inordinate amounts of evolutionary time if they do not
become too destructive. Examples of vestigial body features are widespread
in the animal kingdom, such as the retention of useless but harmless
digital bones in the fins of cetaceans, or the human appendix that only
rarely becomes detrimental through infection.

The fact that we humans exhibit instinctive behaviours as do our simian
ancestors will be denied by some, and that we may have inherited at least
the traces of many such traits from our simian ancestors even more strongly
resisted. Simple examples such as innate fear of snakes by many primates
including man or the common bodily and behavioural reactions to fear across
a wide spectrum of animal species seem much harder to argue away through
Behaviourist or reductionist convictions than to accept with the caveat
that we simply do not know much about how instinctive behaviour is
produced, nor the mechanisms of its inheritance. The general scientific
scepticism today concerning innate biological drives or instincts in humans
is no doubt a continuing legacy of the success of reductionist outlook and
technique in the physical sciences and the attempted emulation of such
methods by the Behaviourist school of psychology. This same trend in
psychology long insisted that even consciousness was not an acceptable
subject for scientific enquiry, and hopefully the recent resurgence of the
study of such formerly taboo subjects will continue apace with further
revivals of ideas silent since the time of William James. To accept that
the xenophobia at root of countless tragic events punctuating human history
might well have its origins in simian evolutionary necessity should be
difficult only for the prejudiced, or perhaps the religious fundamentalist,
for the scientific evidence that could be cited in support of the idea is
significant, if somewhat circumstantial as is much other evidence about the
distant past.[7]

2 If originally the xenophobic instincts of our primate forbears were an
essential and positive factor for the evolution of complex social living,
the trait became far less beneficial and even pathological for humankind.
Especially when expressed irrationally, i.e., without conscious
deliberation or calculated decision and often in contradiction with what
informed conscious deliberation would otherwise produce, the xenophobic
attitude toward outsiders and foreigners can become a force leading
individuals and even entire nations into acts of great destructiveness. The
expression of the xenophobic instinct thus appears in human societies in
perverted forms, it finds outlet through whatever channel it may find
convenient, and perhaps the most obvious and enduring outlet has been
racism. Although the specific characteristics of racism in human societies
are obviously learned -- the kind of individuals or groups that are to be
rejected as inferior and the rituals used to express that rejection -- the
appearance of racism so universally and in so many different guises, as
well as its "knee-jerk" mechanism of expression, argue strongly for the
existence of an underlying and strong instinctive tendency. The
near-universal expression of racism and its parallels to common and
important instinctive behaviours in our primate ancestors might even be
taken as proof positive that inherited instinctive behaviours not only
linger in humans, but might actually be quite rampant in our behavioural
makeup.

The institution of slavery, perhaps the most perfectly adapted vehicle for
the expression of the racism deriving from instinctive xenophobia, existed
not only in the most ancient of times, but also in the most advanced,
intellectually-developed societies until a mere moment ago, in evolutionary
terms. Slavery as an institution has gone hand in hand with the expression
of racism, both to facilitate and rationalise it, and to ignore its
instinctive sources. It is not that racism and slavery are logical or
necessary outcomes of xenophobic drives -- which might have been channelled
into less harmful modes of expression -- or that they did not develop into
forms and institutions whose functions became far removed from the original
needs that made them attractive as satisfiers of those instinctive
tendencies, but that the underlying individual and collective psychological
traits inherited from a long evolutionary development found their most
convenient outlet here, and in lieu of human societies failing to develop
social structures and rituals for rendering the instinctive drive more
benign, slavery and racism became rather permanent and pervasive features
of human societies: they functioned as perverted outlets for the latent but
strong instinctive xenophobia which no longer could be satisfied through
the kind of social situations typical of our primate ancestors. Slavery
very closely resembles the situation we find in certain simian social
structures mentioned above, where newcomers to a group, when allowed at
all, must take up the lowest and most subservient positions in the group,
and strong taboos regulate social interaction of newcomers with ranking
individuals especially with regard to mating and reproduction.

In the course of the development of modern civilisation, however, effective
outlets for the expression of instinctive xenophobia have become fewer, and
the requirements of civilised living more and more restrictive of the more
blatant xenophobic attitudes and practices. The practice of slavery became
increasingly benign, and finally was eliminated as inhuman and criminal.
The wholesale destruction of Jews, indigenous tribes, the lynching of
blacks, "ethnic cleansing," overweening nationalism and other of the more
overt and destructive expressions of racism became impossible -- or at
least socially proscribed - -- as outlets for the xenophobic instinct
except in isolated and fanatic regimes. Increasingly the expression of the
xenophobic instinct has been repressed, for socially and intellectually we
have become increasingly aware of the often disastrous consequences of its
unbridled expression.

Yet the Tex Avery Effect, like rust, never sleeps. With such a
long-surviving instinctive behaviour we may expect to see that, when
repressed, it seeks outlet in another form, in a way disguised from the
repressive mechanisms and conscious disapproval of society, a way not
easily recognised as being an example of the original tendency -- a way, in
fact, completely perverted. The Tex Avery Effect predicts that as one after
the next of available outlets for the expression of instinctive xenophobia
became blocked, substitute behaviours and more unconscious means of
expression were automatically found, and being disguised and more difficult
to identify with the original instinct, were even more harmful and
perverted than their more overt predecessors. In the U.S. a series of more
or less perverted substitutes for the xenophobia originally expressed
through slavery might be recognised: the continued apartheid following
slavery's banishment (which in the 1890s led to a veritable plague of
lynchings in the South), the continued marginalisation, even genocide of
Native American populations, the blatant racism against all `non-whites'
continuing quite openly until the advent of the Civil Rights Movement
forced it underground, the fanatic anti-communism of the McCarthy era, the
disgraceful treatment of Japanese-Americans during W.W.II,[8] and so on. In
other countries we can also see many examples of the xenophobic instinct
gone haywire: the enmity between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the Sikhs and
Hindus of India, the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, the
Arabs and Jews in Israel...

In the case of racism in the U.S., we may see aspects of this process of
repression and substitution illustrated in the following quotation: As
author Crispin Sartwell noted in a recent opinion piece,

"The truth is much uglier....The civil rights movement did not end racism
in [the U.S.] What it did was teach white folks how not to appear to be
racists, not even to themselves.... We white folks have convinced ourselves
that we can't be racists because we don't say the wrong words...or eat in
segregated restaurants or teach [our] children explicitly that black people
are inferior... [Yet] white Americans' image of themselves is constructed
through their exclusion of black people. The basic racism of American
culture has not even been addressed much less solved.... This process is as
strong now as it ever has been."[9]

The actual practice of racism in the U.S. has even distorted what should
properly be conveyed by the term. Racism has come to mean for many the
prejudice of white America for Afro-Americans, Hispanics, and Native
Americans, but should mean all conceivable examples of segregation,
apartheid, and "us-them" prejudice: In the ongoing genocidal interactions
between the various factions in the former Yugoslavia, or in more than one
African location, for example, opposing sides are as genetically identical
as it is possible to be, i.e., they are surely not "races" capable of
"racism" literally defined. Thus a broader meaning of racism must include
the prejudicial actions and attitudes toward any perceived "foreignness"
whether it be based on genes, social class, religion, politics,
nationality, economic status, or whatever. We must employ such a broad
definition to accurately identify all cases of racism and recognise its
source in the inherited xenophobic instinctive drives of our species.

[Continued in Part 2 at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n620.a09.html ]

References: (for part 1)

1. Most ethologists seem today to use the term innate behaviour, perhaps
as a result of the long and stifling influence of Behaviourism which
rejected the concept and even the existence of instinct, and much else for
which its simplistic and absurdly reductionist outlook could find no
"evidence." I shall use the terms instinct and instinctive behaviour
because as a noun, there is a valuable implication in the term that the
phenomenon may well depend on the existence of an actual inherited entity.
Innate, employed solely as an adjective, seems a term designed to ignore
possible cause and origin.

2. Many examples of experimental interventions and resulting modifications
of instinctive behaviours in animals can be found in The Animal Mind, Gould
& Gould, Scientific American Library, 1994.

3. Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size
in primates". Journal of Human Evolution, 20, 469-93. This paper is
discussed in relation to the present themes in The Thinking Ape, Richard
Byrne, Oxford University Press, 1995. See also the collection of papers in
Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect
in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, Richard Byrne & Andrew Whiten, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1988.

4. Not only does controversy rage about the possible connections between
genes and behavior, but the idea of group selection also separates
biologists into warring camps. The widely-respected Harvard professor of
biology Richard C. Lewontin recently wrote, "[The] possibility of group
selection has been regarded as anathema by nearly all evolutionary
biologists, although entirely without empirical evidence. The obvious
hypothesis is that the exclusive concentration on the individual as the
unit of selection is a direct transferral onto evolutionary theory of the
central role of the individual as actor in modern social and economic
thought." ("Survival of the Nicest?" New York Review of Books, October 22,
1998.)

5. In using the term xenophobic at this point I do not mean to imply any
sort of pathological connotation but merely a descriptive one.

6. On the subject of intergroup relations in simians see How Monkeys See
the World, Cheney & Seyfarth, University of Chicago Press, 1990.

7. In "Social intelligence and success: Don't be too clever in order to be
smart" the authors Alain Schmitt and Karl Grammer write, "Indeed,
xenophobia and ethnocentrism are universals and a primate legacy."
(Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations, Andrew Whiten &
Richard W. Byrne, Cambridge University Press, 1997, Chapter 4). References
given are The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Jane Goodall, The Belknap Press, 1986;
Human Universals, Donald E. Brown, McGraw Hill 1991; and Human Ethology,
Irenuis Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Aldine de Gruyter, 1989. The latter author writes,
"Xenophobia is a universal quality...an important component of the human
behavioural repertoire. Infantile xenophobia was...observed in all cultures
we studied. [Even children] born both blind and deaf display fear of
strangers." (pp 174, 289). A reading of Brown's Human Universals should
convincingly illustrate even to the sceptic the poverty inherent in
Behaviourist psychology's dismissal of the role of instinct or innate,
inherited biological drives in human behaviour.

8. The particulars of the story of internment of Japanese-Americans have
not been sufficiently brought to public attention, and they are indeed very
disgraceful and indicative of the peculiarly vicious potential of American
xenophobic tendencies to carry out atrocities well away from the limelight.
A short but revealing overview of the situation is to be found in Drug
Warriors and Their Prey, Richard Lawrence Miller, Praeger Publishers 1996,
p. 149ff.

9. Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1998, "White America Needs Its Bigotry."