BTN News: When faced with a fight, humans exhibit the same reactions as animals: when an intruder enters our home unannounced, when a neighbor takes over a piece of our land, when a predator threatens our children, or when we engage in a rivalry with someone courting the same partner or possessing something we lack.
However, waging war is different: it requires planning, gathering men, providing them with high-tech weapons, and, most importantly, finding the right words to justify the fanaticism that makes soldiers proud to kill without feeling guilty. This is the human condition, the condition of tools and language.
Humans have a brain capable of creating a world of representations that designate things impossible to perceive: God, paradise, life after death, Guernica, the painting. When I walk with my dog in the mountains, he brings his nose to the ground and perceives, much better than I do, the olfactory information that guides him. On the same path, I smell a few things and cannot help but wonder what lies beyond the mountain: a valley or a desert? A friendly village or an enemy? What happens after death—another life, eternal peace, or hell, to suffer punishment for having enjoyed immediate pleasures with no transcendence? Who can explain to me the incredible miracle of being alive: God, chance, or biological evolution?
My human brain allows me to live and inhabit a world of representations separate from the tangible reality that I nonetheless feel deep within my being. Could this be the definition of delusion? (“de-” prefix meaning separation; “lira,” furrow in the earth). I intensely feel facts that might not exist in reality, but from which I construct a representation that dominates me. I rely on what I construct, believe it, and take corresponding actions. My dog cannot do this. He has a better sense of smell, but his access to language (which is not bad) serves to designate things in his environment. Meanwhile, a human being, with the prefrontal lobe—the neurological basis of anticipation—connected to the limbic system—the neurological basis of memory and emotions—has the ability to live in an invisible world that occupies the mind. This is how humans install themselves in the wonderful or terrifying worlds they keep inventing. Anyone can search through their past and find reasons to love their neighbor or justify their death. Arabs should destroy Venice, which built the ships on which Crusaders went to Jerusalem. Protestants have reasons to take revenge on Catholic traitors. Jews could attack all the countries where they have suffered persecutions, and women have the right to kill men.
This approach to the problem of violence leads us to propose two possible origins: one linked to brain development, indicating that an environment impoverished by a lack of affection causes a brain dysfunction in an organism, making it unable to control its impulses—that is the origin of fights. The other originates from a breakdown of verbal communication or a totalitarian language that imposes a single truth, that of the leader. The world of words, also impoverished, creates a representation without alterity where it is not a crime to kill someone who is not considered human—hence arises war.
For centuries, collective discourse has shaped the development of children through a vegetal metaphor. When a child developed well, the seed was good, but when the evolution was bad, the child was a weed. This metaphor did not involve the family or society and proposed a possible remedy: uprooting that weed. This was done with violent children, more with boys than girls. We bit children who bit, punished them, said they needed taming, hit them, and sometimes locked them in reformatory schools or juvenile detention centers where they became wolves to avoid dying of pain. We must be careful with metaphors, as they give us a specific vision of the world and inspire educational methods.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and World War II, the streets filled with millions of orphans and children without families. They sold matches, tried to pickpocket customers, broke into houses to steal, and sometimes grouped together to assault adults. Their extreme violence was an adaptation to a society at war, the destruction of families, and cultural ruin. Non-violent children died of hunger, despair, or were murdered by others. It was the era of pedagogical utopias, when Makarenko and Korczak demonstrated that simply welcoming those small delinquents into a program of constant actions and organizing debates called the children’s republic could structure the active, affective, and verbal space to forge bonds that gave them security. Indeed, a new and positive evolutionary recovery was observed after the chaos. Today, this process is called “resilience.”
The epistemological shift occurred in 1951: pedagogue and psychoanalyst John Bowlby presented his report to the WHO. He proposed an explanation combining genetic data with environmental factors, which was not very common at the time. He discovered that, of a small group of “44 adolescent thieves,” 17 had suffered long and painful separations from their mothers. In the control group of the study, consisting of 44 adolescents who had not committed crimes, only 2 had grown up without maternal care. Thus, it was possible to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the lack of affection at a very young age, introducing a vulnerability factor in the brain, and the explosion that occurs in adolescence, when emotional impulses are at their peak.
This report was very successful internationally in the post-war years when educators needed to understand why children without families were so somber and impulsive and sometimes became delinquents. An avalanche of clinical trials confirmed and detailed this notion, but it was only recently that neuroimaging techniques made it possible to photograph, measure, and evaluate the neurological alterations caused by changes in the environment. In a dualistic culture, where the insubstantial soul is completely separate from the material body, it is difficult to accept that a brain dysfunction could be the result of a social dysfunction. However, images obtained with new techniques show that a child isolated from a very young age, intensely and for a long time, acquires a “brain atrophy” of both prefrontal lobes, the neurological basis of anticipation, and the limbic ring, the neurological basis of memory. When the people around the child offer no relationship, where can they go? Without the capacity for anticipation, neural connections do not establish, so the image shows a dark area. If there is no one to love, if the child lives in an affective desert, they have nothing to remember, no events, no emotions, so the limbic system appears atrophied. When everything is going well, the prefrontal neurons, stimulated by an alterity, inhibit the rhinencephalic amygdala, the neurological basis of unbearable emotions like anger, despair, and hatred. Perhaps this is why a subject immersed in their emotions calms down when there is a plan of action, a family relationship, or a story to elaborate, as observed by Makarenko and Korczak in the field.
The impact of a sensory, affective, or verbal event varies according to the organization of the neuronal receiver. If a four or five-month-old baby is told, “People who believe in God age better than atheists: their faith in a protective God has a calming effect,” the baby will jump for joy. But it will be because of the sensory proximity of that person, their voice, the sparkle in their eyes, the familiar smell perhaps. If this same phrase is said to a seven-year-old child, they will feel more secure and want to believe in that protective God their mother speaks of.
From the age of seven, a child has access to the world of stories, of tales that cannot be perceived: God, lineage, life after death. The child wonders: “Where was I before this life? Where will I go after dying?” Every culture responds with a metaphysical story. “In my family, we are Provençal farmers since the 17th century. My parents came from Poland in the 1930s. We are sailors from father to son.” These are my origins.
“A people suffering hardships in a disorganized society feels better when they believe what their savior tells them.”
Language does not fall from the sky; its ontogenesis offers the speaker the possibility of gradually avoiding the proximity of information, being less subject to context, and accessing, through narrative, a distant and invisible world in which we have no choice but to believe. When a child’s brain is developing in the womb, where they live for nine months as an aquatic mammal, every time their mother speaks, the low frequencies of her voice vibrate against the baby’s forehead and mouth in her womb. After birth, all children learn in a few months to articulate words that designate objects in their context. It takes much longer for them to hear and tell wonderful or terrifying stories that elicit real feelings: “The Bretons received their seafaring talent from the druids of Brocéliande,” or “deadly epidemics are the fault of the Jews.” How can these things be proven? They can only be believed or doubted.
When culture offers several stories, the adolescent who does not want to remain subject to the truths of their parents chooses the fiction that suits them, the one that expresses their desires. This gives them some degree of freedom and affirmation, but when the verbal environment offers only one story, the young person falls into the grip of a totalitarian narrative, the one that expresses and imposes its unique truth. When there are few alternatives, ideas are clearer. When nothing can be proven, slogans repeated by the group to which one belongs replace the truth. The less a person knows, the more convinced they are. It is a great advantage for the lazy mind. One feels very comfortable when surrounded by friends who recite the same words; it provides a sense of strength and security. But euphoric slogans impoverish the world of verbal expression, joyfully
