By the time Humankind began agriculture, collected into cities, developed the written word, the sciences, logical and mathematical study, it was clear that he was superior to just about anything Nature could throw at him. Successive developments have confirmed this: can anybody doubt that a terrestrial creature that can survive in space or on the moon for weeks and months could not possibly prevail over just about any danger or obstacle or problem that should face it? But the problem is this: as soon as Man realized that he could work out any problem or difficulty that Nature should give him with the greatest ease, he found himself suddenly surrounded on all sides by beings hostile to him, that were equal to him in intellect and technology, who were determined in their aims and capable of any cruelty toward him. These beings, of course, were all the other men.

Thus we come to the cliché that Man is his own greatest enemy. Any problem Man should have in all the world he ought to be able to overcome with ease, and indeed can; except, that is, the problem of the other men--which is the only thing that Nature throws at Man equal to him in power and wisdom.

So let us examine the nature of the difficulty.

On the one hand, we have the instinct for aggression and rage characteristic to widely varying degrees of all humans, that probably developed as a means to deal with dangers in nature from beasts and other tribes. All humans have a desire and even need to inflict suffering at some time on others unnecessarily, from harm as small as a harsh insult on up. This is not strictly rational nor is most of the suffering men and women inflict on others in any way necessary to the end of helping anyone at all. It comes from the basic desire we all have to inflict harm on those who have harmed us or may do so, manifested in individuals in an incredibly varied way and to incredibly varied degrees, most likely because of the complexity of the human brain and the consequent complexity in the basic human instincts this produces.

And on the other hand, we have the universal desire for the utmost good that is the conscious wish of nearly all of us. With this goal and desire for the good, and our uniquely capable intellects, this really ought to be sufficient for us to overcome the aggressive instinct. Indeed, where this is possible, we have succeeded in doing this to a very large degree. Just as our reason is capable of overcoming external nature, it is capable of at least handling this aggression instinct very well in most cases, at least where it is possible (we will see where this handling becomes almost impossible later). Should some disease strike all humankind that made any sexual contact between humans immediately fatal, I have no doubt we would not simply die out. Nor would we have to suppress our sexual instinct in a debilitating way: we would find a way to satisfy the instinct as well as reproduce with technology, overcoming not only external nature but internal biological nature with reason. In our social setting we likewise have mental health professionals who deal with (of course not exclusively) helping people handle their own aggression and anger in relationships in ways that do not unnaturally or harmfully suppress the aggression instinct and at the same time minimizes its harmful effects.

In the category also of reason overcoming our aggressive nature, in our present nation states we have the social contract agreement whereby all extreme differences that might lead to violence are dealt with in a civil manner via legal courts and rule of law, government being the universal redresser of wrongs so that we feel safe from others harming us. These ideas go back to the Hobbesian social contract theorists. Each of us sees that it is most rational for us to agree to not harm any others in any extreme fashion in exchange for others doing the same for us. Of course, Hobbes did not claim that before the fact of any actual manifestation of such a social contract it was all worked out consciously and explicitly. Hobbes was examining just what the rationale might be behind state or city-state societies, how it is they function and just what purposes they serve and social needs they meet. He has done it very well in my opinion, so let us take a look at how his ideas apply to the present essay.

Hobbes held that men were by nature self-interested, but that in state societies it serves the self-interest of all for all to agree upon rule of law such that all lay down their right to harm others in exchange for the same from them. I would hold that it is not quite so individual a self-interest that is essential in us as Hobbes would propose; I would hold that humans do not constantly say, "I against all these others--we are at odds" but rather "We against our enemies--we are at odds." That is, humans are not self-interested; they are clan-interested. Men and women are capable of incredible heroics and can and often do die for not only intimate friends, but for things like their nation or others with which they have no personal connection beyond a strong loyal feeling. In our tribes we were certainly at odds with--or if not at odds at least we had no need to care about--the other tribes that were either dangerous to us or at the least contributed nothing to our welfare. I believe that since then this phenomenon of "we are more important than those others" has made us incredibly more sympathetic to anyone we seem to be grouped together with than people outside that group. On the one hand, the tribal life demanded we be heroic at times and even die for the others of our tribe; we must have developed a strong sympathy with them. On the other hand, either we had a need to be absolutely cruel to those of alien clans and tribes, or in the least we had no reason to love them: after all, clans didn't contribute to the welfare of one another, if they did no harm.

This has been transformed through history and down to our day, into just one of the thousands of side effects of evolution that have come with the development of the human brain. Now, we still say, "Us and them; we and these others: we are not the same." Now we group into races, religions, nations and so on. Again, this "us and them" mentality is manifested with incredible variety and in varying degrees in all of us. It varies from xenophobic racists who do not recognize the right of anyone who looks different from them to live, to a very mild preference for Americans over foreigners in sympathy. If anyone says he or she has absolutely zero xenophobic tendencies in all his or her psyche, just ask yourself whether you are more dismayed (assuming you are American) at some disaster in America than an equal or greater one elsewhere. How many Americans wept on September 11, versus when they heard the news of the South Asian tsunami? And why is it that whenever some disaster happens anywhere in the world, even if 3 out of the 400 killed are Americans, the American news always takes note of that fact?

Thus, I would differ from Hobbes in his emphasis on individual self-interest being essential to human nature, but if we apply it to group-self-interest, I think that he was right. I would propose that when we first began to gather into city-state societies and erect rulers over us who would be the arbiters between us, law and law enforcement, and so on, this functioned precisely upon Hobbesian lines. It was beneficial and rational for all to "agree" (only after a manner of speaking, and not literal explicit agreement) not to murder or rob or attack any other in exchange for the others doing the same. The whole city-state then began to internally be identified as a new "us" after the manner of tribes in the past, its members being more important to its members than those of any other city-state or group. Any tragedy happening to foreigners bothered people much less than one happening to members of one's own city, even when these were never known personally and had never been met.

The Hobbesian model makes sense and is a good account of the function of the city-state and all societies with any governmental authority, according to its ability to meet the needs of the people under the social contract with minimal damaging conflict between them. Perhaps it was not till the Enlightenment that such a social contract theory came about explicitly, but to say these ideas were not just under the surface of the prohibitions of murder, theft and fraud in the ancient world is to say people knew nothing of deductive logic before Aristotle. Had ancient Macedonia considered making murder or robbery legal, the first thought on all the people's minds would be, "But if the king won't prohibit that, what if these others do it to me?" This is one way in which our rational nature has overcome the aggression-drive that is essential to us. It matters not whether it was mostly conscious or mostly unconscious reasoning that brought it about. For reason does indeed happen unconsciously. Cultures have always adjusted themselves to circumstances in a very rational way, and it has always been and continues to be an unconscious adjustment. Conscious "social engineering" is a new practice and it hardly has any effectiveness in impacting a large portion of any culture, nor impacting it to a large degree, at least in free societies. But still, cultures adapt to change and circumstance in an undeniably rational way, while no discussion about what beliefs need to be spread throughout the culture go on to a very large extent. It seems the culture senses what it needs and people start to believe what will work without anyone deciding what this is consciously, at least for the most part. This is not exactly some inexplicable mystery nor even very unusual; in fact what would be unusual would be for us to be so rational on the conscious level and not be so also in the unconscious.

(For simplicity, I shall henceforth use the terms "nation" and "national" to mean any culture with an authoritative government, from small city-state on up to nation states, and the term "international" to describe the dynamics of any external interaction between such.)

But as much as reason has solved the problems that the aggression-drive ought to cause when we left the tribal mode and formed nations, reason can only do so much. The rise of nations is the beginning of history, and the interactions between those nations and the brutality that has always accompanied them are the problem of history. The problem of history is as old as history, but we have made little progress against it. Indeed, while our technology has soared to unbelievable accomplishments, the problem of history seems at best to have been little impacted by all our efforts to solve it. I think it is clear, given the century just past, that the problem of history has become augmented to an incredible degree and is the only problem facing humans that we have had nil success at handling. Wars are as old as nations themselves, and people have always known they are the worst thing that has ever befallen our race. But no matter how bad war is, no matter if it is the one thing that has done us the most damage by far in all the world, no matter what we accomplish in all other endeavors, we are unable to effectively solve this problem in the slightest.