Media, Culture and Human Violence

From Savage Lovers to Violent Complexity

Jeff Lewis

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781783485147
• eBook ISBN: 9781783485161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Humans of the advanced world are the most violent beings of all times. This violence is evident in the conditions of perpetual warfare and the accumulation of the most powerful and destructive arsenal ever known to humankind. It is also evident in the devastating impact of advanced world economy and cultural practices which have led to ecological devastation and the current era of mass species extinction. —one of only six mass extinction events in planetary history and the only one caused by the actions of a single species, humans. This violence is manifest in our interpersonal relationships, and the ways in which we organize ourselves through hierarchical systems that ensure the wealth and privilege of some, against the penury and misery of others.

In this new and highly original book, Jeff Lewisargues that violence is deeply inscribed in human culture, thinking and expressive systems (media). Lewis contends that violence is not an inescapable feature of an aggressive human nature. Rather, violence is laced through our desires and dispositions to communalism and expressive interaction. From the near extinction of all Homo sapiens, around 74,000 years ago, the invention of culture and media enabled humans to imagine and articulate particular choices and pleasures. Organized intergroup violence or warfare emerged through the exercise of these choices and their expression through larger and increasingly complex human societies. This agitation of amplified desire, hierarchical social organization and mediated knowledge systems has created a cultural volition of violent complexity which continues into the present.

Media, Culture and Human Violence examines the current conditions of conflict and harm as an expression of our violent complexity.

Chapter One The Cultural Animal

THE CALDERA AND ME

I am a frequent visitor to Lake Toba, a caldera sitting high the volcanic ranges of Sumatra, Indonesia. According to local mythology, the spring waters that feed the lake rise from Aek Sipangolu, the Stone of Eternity. It is said that the waters are so pure they will cure illness, repair broken bones and restore youthful vigour to ageing bodies. A resting place for souls on their journey to heaven, Lake Toba has become renowned for its serene, almost ethereal, scenic beauty.

Yet lying within this sleepy vista, there is also a vague and disquieting sense of menace. Stories of walking ghosts and shattering thunder abound. Visitors often speak of restless sleep, and local villagers warn of an angry Earth and demons that creep about in the thickets and reeds that line the Toba shores. They speak of a dark secret that is buried in the deep waters, and sometimes is whispered to the cool morning mists. This secret, they say, is borne in the soft scent of lava and ash that drifts around Sumatra’s volcanic ranges.

Lake Toba, in fact, is the world’s largest volcanic caldera. Stretching over three hundred square kilometres and reaching depths of up to five hundred metres, the lake represents the afterbirth of the Earth’s most powerful volcanic eruption of the past twenty-five million years.¹ The Toba lake lies over one of only several of the planet’s ‘supervolcanoes’. These are the volcanoes that have ejected over one thousand cubic kilometres (km³) of volcanic material, ash and gases into Earth’s biosphere. Supervolcanoes, like Toba and the Huckleberry Ridge Caldera in America’s Yellowstone National Park, are thousands of times more powerful than conventional volcanoes, and are usually associated with the extremely unstable impact zones that stretch aroundthe Earth’s tectonic plates. Indonesia is one of the hotspots along the tectonic zone that is known as the Ring of Fire.²

Toba is the most powerful of these supervolcanoes, releasing over 2,800 km³of ejecta into the biosphere. Toba is particularly significant because it erupted around 74,000 years Before Present (BP), which is within the twohundred-thousand-year span of anatomically modern human habitation on Earth.³ The only other supervolcano to have erupted during this time span at 28,000 BP occurred at Lake Taupo in New Zealand’s North Island. While still a very powerful eruption, the Taupo ejecta was less than half the volume of the Toba supervolcano.⁴

According to most geologists and palaeobotanists, the density and volume of Toba’s ejecta created a dark and noxious sulphuric cloud that covered much of the Earth’s surface.⁵ The ash and other ejecta blanketed forests and grasslands, disrupting the food chains and destroying whole ecosystems. Waterways were contaminated, and marine life perished. The sulphur cloud blocked the sun and created the conditions of a volcanic winter as insolation levels plummeted and plants were deprived of sunlight for photosynthesis. While the duration and impact of this winter is debated, clear evidence of its presence has been found in alluvial and botanical residues dating to this period.⁶

Many scientists and scholars believe that the volcanic winter brought a range of species—including humans—to the brink of extinction. There is certainly clear genomic evidence that around the time of the Toba eruption the whole human population experienced a radical and rapid decline known as a population ‘bottleneck’. The total population of modern humans around this time had declined to around two thousand individuals. The genetic and archaeological evidence demonstrates that these populations were largely confined to areas in East and Northeast Africa, and the areas of the Middle East that are closest to Africa (the Levant). Thus, while earlier hominids like Homo erectus had left Africa and occupied various parts of Eurasia, anatomically modern humans only evolved around 200,000 BP and had not migrated beyond the African doorstep until much later.⁷ This ‘Out of Africa’ theory argues that modern humans didn’t journey into Eurasia until some time after the population bottleneck, possibly as recently as sixty thousand years ago.⁸

The circumstantial evidence suggests to many archaeologists and anthropologists that this population bottleneck was caused by the Toba volcanic winter.⁹ One archaeologist, Stanley Ambrose, argues that the rapid and dramatic change to climatic conditions precipitated by Toba significantly challenged all species that were accustomed to a warmer and more humid climate. Ambrose claims that the human population bottleneck occurred contemporaneously with a rapid population decline in many of the primates of East Africa and Southeast Asia—including our near species cousins, the chimpanzees. This impact parallels the likely effects of the volcanic winter on humans.

The extent of the volcanic cloud has been confirmed by a number of archaeologists examining botanical and ash residues in East Africa.¹⁰ Studying the mud residues in Lake Malawi in East Africa, one group of researchers found an extraordinary density of volcanic shards associated with the Toba eruption some seven thousand kilometers from the lake. Other researchers have found evidence of significant climate and botanical effects of the Toba eruption in India. While the duration and full impact of the Toba eruption continues to be researched and debated, there can be no doubting the circumstantial connection between the supervolcano and the severe bottleneck in the human population around seventy-three thousand to seventy-four thousand years ago.¹¹

PHEW: OUR NEAR EXTINCTION

Some scientists argue that Toba was not the only contributor to the population bottleneck of 74,000 years BP. These scientists suggest that disease, or some other environmental catastrophe, may have already weakened the human population. In these circumstances the volcanic winter may have been the final contributing factor to the survival crisis. Whatever factors conspired against our species, it is very clear that this near extinction event decimated the modern human clans of Africa, unravelling their economic and social fabric.

It may be that the force and allure of Lake Toba is underscored by this cataclysm, this apocalyptic moment in our human history. While science works to reveal the ecological and biogenetic impact of the event, we can only imagine the cultural and personal horror that the survivors must have experienced. These people, who had essentially the same brains, bodies, emotions, needs and desires as you and I, must have witnessed the dramatic withering away of their families and communities. They would have watched in a state of abject sorrow as all the people who had enriched their lives and given meaning to their emotions and pleasures began to perish—parents, partners, siblings, friends and children.

In the aftermath of the horror, the survivors no doubt would have wondered about the vacuity and mystery of it all. Bearing their own deep emotional and psychological wounds, they would have faced the terrible prospect ofrebuilding their lives, economy, social bonds and cultures. With the meanings and loves that had held their social group together now in ruins, the survivors might have gazed anew at the evening skies and contemplated an immensity that had stripped bare their world and reduced them to a condition of fear and grief that could not be exorcised by words nor the consoling ideals of enlightened knowing.

Indonesia lies along the Pacific Rim of Fire and remains subject to powerful tectonic and volcanic forces. This image of the volcanic landscape around Bromo in Indonesia represents a microcosm of the global catastrophe that the Toba supervolcano wreaked on the planetary ecosystem around seventy-four thousand years ago.

Even so, these isolated and scattered bands were the fount of a new beginning, a new hope for the species. These new humans, agents of the apocalypse, would take us forward into a new future, a new phase of being human.

AGENTS OF THE APOCALYPSE

As a scattered group of individuals and clans, the surviving humans weren’t able to meet and adopt a systematic response to the catastrophe. They wouldnot have conceived of themselves as part of a species under threat, though of course they would have felt the imperatives of survival and a need for creative solutions to their immediate plight. Either way, the groups gradually recovered, developing new relationships and mechanisms for repopulation. Like other species that had faced a bottleneck and extinction threat, the surviving humans sought new opportunities for prosperity and enjoyment in life.

While they were genetically the same, these ‘new’ humans were somehow different from their predisaster antecedents. In many respects, these new humans laid the foundations for all that is to follow, leading up to the present and the humans we have become. If we are to understand ourselves, and our present plights and pleasures, then we need to look to this critical moment, this new beginning, when our human origins made a major shift in direction, much of which can be attributed to the near extinction event.

This shift has been generally well understood by archaeologists who define the period from around 70,000 to 10,000 years BP as the Upper Palaeolithic, or Late Stone Age. Again, however, the dating is crucial as it overlaps with the period in which the survivors of the near extinction event undergo phenomenal changes in their cultural, economic, technological and social practices. So complete and far reaching are these changes that we might risk describing this period as the true origin of our humanness, the period in which humans invented culture and, in some ways, invented themselves.¹²

The near extinction event, therefore, is directly related to the following changes.

1. Reduction in Genetic Variability:

The Founder Effect

One of the major effects of the near extinction event was to significantly reduce the gene variability in the human population. Geneticists have demonstrated that humans today have very little genetic variation. Examining the genomes of different ethnic and regional groups, scientists have concluded that all humans are 99.5 percent identical with variations on particular gene alleles providing the biological variability that distinguishes each individual human. Other than some very minor genetic differences associated with familial traits and mutations on these alleles, humans across the planet share a very narrow range of genes.¹³ This similarity suggests a very small and quite recent gene source. Humans, in fact, have a much narrower genetic diversity than most other animal species, including chimpanzees.

This limited gene variation is more clearly evident in particular human groups. Homo sapiens who remained in Africa after the near extinction event, for example, have slightly more genetic diversity than non-Africans.¹⁴ The non-African groups are the descendants of those human clans who migrated out of Africa and the African Near East some time after the near extinction event. Geneticists suggest that their lower level of diversity is most likely due to the small size of the clans and groups who immigrated into new terrains. Having lost a great deal of genetic diversity through the population bottleneck, these migratory clans moved away from the founder populations, leaving the migrants with considerably reduced breeding choices—and hence a very limited gene pool. In what is called the ‘founder effect’, this means that these very small populations of immigrants experienced a ‘genetic drift’: that is, particular genes simply disappeared because of the small breeding options.

This founder effect has been identified in other human population bottlenecks when small breakaway groups of humans colonize new terrains and then become isolated or have limited breeding (and hence genetic) options.¹⁵ As well as genetic drift and disappearance, the founder effect can also influence the frequency of other genes associated with physical traits (height, skin pigment, eye colour) and susceptibility to particular disease. The Dutch Afrikaner people who colonized South Africa, for example, have an unusually high rate of Huntington’s disease. This is most likely because the early settlers carried the gene, and with limited breeding options, the gene became amplified across the community.

2. Population Rebound

Human population rebounded significantly following the near extinction disaster. This rebound may simply be the result of the original threat—disease, environmental hazard, loss of habitat—subsiding or exhausting itself. With the threat removed, the species is then able to return to its previous survival, economic and reproductive practices.

Humans, of course, have a greater capacity than most other species for deliberation and strategic thinking. In the course of the Upper Palaeolithic period, following the near extinction disaster, some human groups may have deliberately expanded their population numbers, believing in a principle of populate or perish. Such strategies may have evolved for defensive reasons—not only as a defence against the violent attacks of other groups but also as a buffer to prevent devastation of the clan’s population from other threats.

This strategy was by no means a simple one as increased numbers also involved increased pressure on resources. The combination of inherited trauma, population increase and related resource requirements perhaps contributed to the human migration and territorial expansion. As we will discuss in later chapters, this trajectory of population increase and territorialism are also linked to increases in intergroup tensions and sporadic forms of conflict. Demography, in fact, becomes a primary survival issue for these new humans during the course of the Upper Palaeolithic period. This issue is also critical to the closure of the period, beginning around eleven thousand years ago and escalating through to the present population crises.

3. Migration and New Resources

Migration and the further dispersal of the species was certainly part of the new humans’ survival strategy. It has become increasingly clear that modern humans began a significant migratory journey out of Africa some time around the era of the population bottleneck and release. The precise dates of these migrations remain a matter of debate, but most archaeologists are convinced that it began around seventy-five to fifty thousand years ago.

These dates are now based on a combination of genetic and archaeological evidence. As noted, non-Africans have slightly less genetic diversity than Africans. The timing of the genetic separation of the two groups coincides with the presence of modern humans in Europe around 45,000 years Before Present,¹⁶ and in Australia around fifty thousand to fifty-five thousand years ago.

Like population increase, these patterns of migration and mobility remain a significant feature of human practices into the present global conditions. Clearly, these migratory practices represent a significant survival strategy, as well as a potential source of human pleasure and conflict.

4. Language, Self-Consciousness and the Shock of Knowing

The trauma of the near extinction event may well have driven some human groups into new geographic regions with new economic opportunities. It may be, therefore, that the near extinction crisis propelled the new humans into a great leap forward, which also carried them into new cultural and technological horizons. Certainly, the migrations that bore these modern human groups into...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Cultural Animal
• 2. Savage Lovers: Language, Communalism and Violent Simplicity
• 3 Symbolic Revolutions: Agriculture, Climate Change and the Beginnings of War
• 4 Violent Complexity: Writing, God and the Ancient Enlightenment
• 5 What Is Enlightenment? Liberalism, Romantic Science and the First Mass Media
• 6 In the Age of Agitation: Modern Media, Violent Consumers and Imaginings of State
• 7 Web of Worlds: Nature, Love and the Internet
• Conclusion: #ISIS
• Bibliography