The Queen - Matt Ridley

If war is something we inherited directly from the hostility between groups of male apes over female apes, with territory as merely a means to the end—sex—then it follows that tribal people must be going to war over women rather than territory. For a long time anthropologists insisted that war was fought over scarce material resources, in particular protein, which was often in short supply.

So when Napoleon Chagnon, trained in this tradition, went to Venezuela to study the tribal Yanomamo in the 1960s, he was in for a shock: " These people were not fighting over what I was trained to believe they were fighting over—scarce resources. They were fighting over women. "" Or at least so they said. There is a tradition in anthropology that you should not believe what people tell you, so Chagnon was ridiculed for believing them. Or as he puts it, "You are allowed to admit the stomach as a source of war but not the gonads. " Chagnon went back again and again and eventually accu-

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The Red Queen

mulated a terrifying set of data that proves beyond doubt that men who kill other men (unokais) have more wives, independent of their social standing, than men who do not become murderers.'°

Among the Yanomamo, war and violence are both primarily about sex: War between two neighboring villages breaks out over the abduction of a woman or in retaliation for an attack that had such a motive, and it always results in women changing hands: The most common cause of violence within a village is also sexual jealousy; a village that is too small is likely to be raided for women, but a village that is too large usually breaks up over adultery.

Women are the currency and reward of male violence in the Yanomamo, and death is common. By the age of forty, two-thirds of the people have lost a close relative to murder—not that this dulls the pain and fear of murder. To Yanomamo who leave their forests, the existence in the outside world of laws that prevent chronic murder is miraculous and tremendously desirable. Likewise, the Greeks fondly remembered the replacement of revenge by justice as a milestone, through the legend of the trial of Orestes.

According to Aeschylus, Orestes killed Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon, but the Furies were persuaded by Athena to accept the court ' s verdict and end the system of blood feuds." Thomas Hobbes did not exaggerate when he listed among the features of life of primitive mankind " continual fear and danger of violent death"; though he was much less correct in the second and more familiar part of the sentence: "and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. "

Chagnon now believes that the conventional wisdom—people only fight over scarce resources—misses the point. If resources are scarce, then people fight over them. If not, they do not: "Why bother, " he says, "to fight for mangango nuts when the only point of having mangango nuts is so that you can have women: Why not fight over women? " Most human societies, he believes, are not touching some ceiling of resource limitation. The Yanomamo could easily clear larger gardens from the forest to grow more plantain trees, but then they would have too much to eat.' Z

There is nothing especially odd about the Yanomamo. All POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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studies of preliterate societies done before national governments were able to impose their laws upon them revealed routinely high levels of violence: One study estimated that one-quarter of all men were killed in such societies by other men: As for the motives, sex is dominant:

The founding myth of Western culture, Homer' s Iliad, is a story that begins with a war over the abduction of a woman, Helen.

Historians have long considered the abduction of Helen to Troy to be no more than a pretext for territorial confrontation between the Greeks and the Trojans: But can we be so confidently condescending? Perhaps the Yanomamo really do go to war over women, as they say they do. Perhaps Agamemnon 's Greeks did, too, as Homer said they did. The Iliad opens with and is dominated by a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the cause of which is Agamemnon's insistence on confiscating a concubine, Briseis, from Achilles in compensation for having to give back his own concubine, Chry-seis, to her priest-father who has enlisted Apollo's aid against the Greeks: This dissension in the ranks, caused by a dispute over a woman, nearly loses the Greeks the whole war, which in turn has been caused by a dispute over a woman:

In preagricultural societies, violence may well have been a route to sexual success, especially in times of turmoil: In many different cultures the captives taken in war have tended to be women rather than men. But echoes reach into modern times. Armies have often been motivated as much by the opportunities that victory would present for rape as they have been by patriotism or fear.

Generals, recognizing this, turned blind eyes to the excesses of their troops and were sure to provide camp followers: Even in this century, access to prostitutes has been a more or less recognized purpose of shore leave in navies: And rape accompanies war still. In Bangladesh, during a nine-month occupation by west Pakistani troops in 1971, up to 400,000 women may have been raped by soldiers." In Bosnia in 1992, the reports of organized rape camps for Serbian soldiers became too frequent to ignore. Don Brown, an anthropologist in Santa Barbara, recalls his days in the army: "Men talked about sex night and day; they never talked about power.'

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The Red Queen

MONOGAMOUS DEMOCRATS

The nature of the human male, then, is to take opportunities, if they are granted him, for polygamous mating and to use wealth, power, and violence as means to sexual ends in the competition with other men—though usually not at the expense of sacrificing a secure monogamous relationship: It is not an especially flattering picture, and it depicts a nature that is very much at odds with modern ethical preferences—for monogamy, fidelity, equality, justice, and freedom from violence: But my task is description, not prescription: And there is nothing inevitable about human nature: In The African Queen, Katharine Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart,

" Nature, Mr Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above: "

Besides, the long interlude of human polygamy, which began in Babylon nearly four thousand years ago, has largely come to an end in the West: Official concubines became unofficial mistresses, and mistresses became secrets kept from wives: In 1988, political power, far from being a ticket to polygamy, was jeopar-dized by any suggestion of infidelity: Whereas the Chinese emperor Fei-ti once kept ten thousand women in his harem, Gary Hart, running for the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, could not even get away with two.

What happened? Christianity? Hardly: It coexisted with polygamy for centuries, and its strictures were as cynically self-interested as any layman's: Women's rights? They came too late. A Victorian woman had as much and as little say in her husband 's affairs as a medieval one: No historian can yet explain what changed, but guesses include the idea that kings came to need internal allies enough that they had to surrender despotic power.

Democracy, of a sort, was born. Once monogamous men had a chance to vote against polygamists (and who does not want to tear down a competitor, however much he might also like to emulate him?), their fate was sealed.

Despotic power, which came with civilization, has faded again: It looks increasingly like an aberration in the history of POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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humanity. Before "civilization" and since democracy, men have been unable to accumulate the sort of power that enabled the most successful of them to be promiscuous despots. The best they could hope for in the Pleistocene period was one or two faithful wives and a few affairs if their hunting or political skills were especially great: The best they can hope for now is a good-looking younger mistress and a devoted wife who is traded in every decade or so.