The world was once surprised and excited by the discovery of the Tasaday, a tribe of twenty-seven food-gathering people who had been living in complete isolation on Mindanao Island in the Philippines, where their tribal ancestors had lived similar lives for at least six centuries. The most striking and significant characteristic of this small band is their complete lack of aggressiveness. They have no words for weapon, hostility, anger, or war. Since contact with outsiders, they have eagerly adopted the long Filipino knife, the bolo, because it is superior to their stone tools for gathering food, chopping wood, and slashing through jungle brush. But they have turned down the spear and the how and arrow because they cannot use them for gathering food. And all the food they collect (yams, fruit, berries, flowers, fish, crabs, frogs) they divide carefully and equally among all members of the band.
The Tasaday are significant because they are food gatherers, as were all human beings before the agricultural revolution - in other words, for over 80 percent of human history. If, during all those tens of thousands of years, people everywhere were as peaceful as the Tasaday, then we cannot accept the common belief that Homo sapiens are innately aggressive.
Unfortunately, at the same time the world was learning about the Tasaday, another band of thirty people, the Fentou, were discovered in New Guinea. These tribesmen are fierce warriors, continually fighting with bows and arrows. Similar contradictions appeared historically among the American Indians. The Comanches and Apaches raised their children to be fighters, whereas the Hopis and Zunis raised theirs for peaceful living - and still do.
So, where does this leave us regarding the nature of human nature? The record of history suggests that human beings are born neither peace-loving nor war-loving - neither cooperative nor aggressive. What determines how human beings act is not their genes but how their society teaches them to act. The psychologist Albert Bandura, who has specialized in this subject, has concluded that human nature is "a vast potentiality that can be fashioned by social influences into a variety of forms... Aggression is not an inevitable or unchangeable aspect of man but a product of aggression-promoting conditions within society."
This question about human nature is of life-and-death significance for us all. With the develop1ment of technology, wars have become more deadly. They have also beco1me more frequent. There were not many wars during the Paleolithic period, which covers most of human history, because the small food-gathering bands could use only so much territory. They had nothing to gain by trying to take over the territory of a neighboring band. In fact, they had everything to lose be cause bloody wars might very well have destroyed the human race at a time when so few were scattered about the globe.
All this changed with the agricultural revolution. As agriculture became more productive, population increased, villages grew into cities, and cities grew into empires with great palaces and temples and accumulated wealth. With so much now to fight over, wars became more and more frequent and destructive. The important lesson that history teaches us is that such wars are not inevitable. They have occurred not because of human nature but because of human societies. And human societies have been made by human beings and can be remade by human beings.