My original hypothesis on the origins of human violence and language was called the ROBA Hypothesis, which stood for Recursive Object-Based Aggression, an ability that is unique to humans. After some more research I’m confident that the condition that produces human (grammatical) language is not aggression itself. Chimps technically use object-based aggression by swinging sticks and throwing stones or other things. But these objects never intentionally factor into animal combat, and so chimps do not have grammatical language. All object usage in animal combat is incidental: a chimp might throw a rock at another chimp or swing a stick, but no other chimps mimic his action, and the individual chimp doesn’t understand the benefits of using an object in combat against another antagonist. Otherwise he would repeat it. In 5 million years, they still haven’t done this.
So what comes from this is an important distinction between “aggression” and “combat.” “Aggression” is a behavior, while “combat” is the clash itself. A chimp holding up a rock can only be “aggression” because no other chimps believe that the rock presents an existential threat to their wellbeing. This is because chimps only throw rocks to intimidate which is also “aggression.” However, a human holding up a rock for intimidation presents a very different scenario. It’s still technically “aggression” since there’s no clash yet, but the rock is understood to be deadly now. If the person throws it, this action can and often does become “combat.” If it misses the target, then the target might throw a rock back. Some humans will throw rocks for intimidation, blurring the line between “aggression” and “combat” which presents lots of interesting grey area legally. The term “assault” is often the grey area between “aggression” or intent, and “combat”. “Battery” by contrast is a more concrete term for the combat itself. I wonder if it’s the older of the two terms, and “assault” was created in order to acknowledge that the THREAT of object-based combat is often practically guaranteed to lead to object-based combat itself.
We shouldn’t hypothesize over the chimp’s mental state with regards to aggression and combat. We aren’t chimps, and we should stop pretending that we are. No human is a chimp, because all humans understand the existential threat of a deadly weapon and will respond with an equally or more deadly weapon if they want to trump the opponent physically. Chimps can’t think like this. And yet the academic world has been so blinded by scientific orthodoxy for the past 175 years that they still believe humans and chimps think about combat and aggression the same way. Imagine the insanity if academic views on violence became law: humans throwing rocks at one another would be compared to chimp rock-throwing, and such an act might cease to be called “assault with a deadly weapon” or “assault and battery” or “stoning,” but rather be re-classified under the legal category “object-based aggression.”
And so my old term “recursive object-based aggression” (ROBA) is inadequate to describe the vast difference between human object usage in combat and animal object usage for intimidation. There is therefore no need to even call it “object-based aggression.”
I was thinking it could be “object-based combat” (OBC). Object-based combat (OBC) is a human-only endeavor. And if my hypothesis is correct, that object-based combat (OBC) gives rise to an infinitely deep shared moment of anticipation between human antagonists, which is a “recursive” state, then object-based combat (OBC) is by definition “recursive.” So we can get rid of the R in the acronym.
This doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as the recursive-aggression version (ROBA). It’s just that 1) it can only be “recursive” with humans since animals do not have the unoptimized condition which produces the problem to begin with, being optimized for combat against their own weapons, and 2) it can only be “aggression” if framed within a linguistic structure with rules, penalties, etc.
The term “combat” is a problem, though, since we use “combat” when both talking about UFC (in which the combat is forced to end by a third party) and talking about warfare (in which there is no third party to force the combat to stop). I could use the term “object-based warfare” to distinguish these scenarios, but then we’d be including small-scale conflicts like fights in the street in the term “warfare”.
There are also leagues which utilize “object-based combat” (OBC) such as in HEMA which utilizes metal weapons which can kill. However, OBC within this context is contained within very strict structures. HEMA organizations have a stilted air about them compared to empty-handed fight leagues whose participants tend to be more gregarious. It’d be hard to fathom a HEMA tournament where the contestants were allowed to trash talk each other’s families, for example, before a fight. At least this is my impression in America. Perhaps they do this in Eastern Europe and there are better guard rails up against this outside of HEMA, but in America…
In America we have shockingly few social guardrails against trash talk. We simply say “this is unacceptable” and express indignation when it happens. I remember McGregor saying he’d “murder” Dustin Poirier, and Poirier got huffy during a press conference saying something like, “You just don’t do that.” So we saw the effect of Celtic aggression against an American southerner who couldn’t fathom such a thing, or at least tried to swing the language toward southern indignation (and I think Poirier failed here, since he couldn’t get with the jargon, and the jargon has continued to steamroll indignance, though Covington’s MAGA-ism seems to be a losing battle). The UFC therefore brings a very interesting new definition to “combat” where trash-talking is given more danger since it’s applied to actual combat that’s more palpable than WWE combat, and we get to see all these diverse responses. Stoic Muslims and Christians vs. cut-and-dry Eastern Europeans vs. gregarious Irish and African warriors. I’m not sure this could continue if they allowed “objects” in the UFC like sticks and shields. It would probably have to become very rigid like HEMA, at least for now.
All this is to say that these terms, “assault,” “combat,” “murder,” and “aggression” carry murky definitions that come into conflict during UFC pressers, on social media and in other situations, which gives rise to interesting debates, in whatever form those take. Nobody seems to take these debates very seriously in the academic world, but they should. In the UFC and popular world, and the legal world too, these terms are always in flux. Look at terms like “consent,” which continues to be debated. I think that debate is good, but that legal changes should maybe be further downstream until we understand the real implications of codifying what that term means. If it becomes like “assualt,” then we might still be at a loss for what it means. We see this ambiguity played out over and over again.
Academics have been fairly rigid about their definitions of “violence” and “aggression.” I think this is because they don’t think much about them, because they tend not to be aggressive people. Most of us are aggressive. We watch Jason Statham movies, we laugh when guys get kicked in the nuts, think guns are cool, and have been punched in the face more than once. If you were to have a conversation with an average joe in the street about “what violence is” you’d have a very interesting conversation. You would not have the same interesting conversation with an upper class author or sociologist. They’re too rigid, because they don’t actually know the world of violence. Yet they research and write on it, more than you or I do. Their dogmatism on the issue is probably a symptom of their discomfort with it.
An academic should take some boxing classes, not private classes at their rock climbing gym, but in a hood. They should meet and fight guys who don’t like them. They should feel that dislike when they get punched in the face. Acknowledge you’re part of the whole magnetic field of human violence. Then go research “violence” as something you’re enmeshed in, not something that exists out there. Treat it like a quantum physicist who understands that his being part of the experiment alters the experiment itself.
Until then, their terms “conflict,” “aggression,” and “violence” will have meanings that are disconnected from reality as 99% of the world knows it. These terms tend to be solidified in institutions that are insulated from the threats and realities of violence. But that’s insulation, not exception. If violence creates the infinitely deep Merge field which gives rise to grammatical language, and this language eventually gives rise to elite institutions, then they are just deeper in the Matrix than the rest of us. Violence can crumple them. They cannot surgically remove violence from humanity. The first cut they make will bleed their own institutions first. They may or may not know this rationally, but they seem to intuit it.
Thanks to some very creative drafting skills they have created a fictional blueprint which relegates “violence” to an external source that they claim to be able to fix with the latest study or scientific or genomic thing, whatever that is. These studies always trace violence to some leftover chimp thing that competes for resources with “rationality” or “cognition,” like a neighbor draining power through a badly wired outlet. In order to maintain the fiction that violence is “out there”, they CANNOT differentiate human and chimp combat. Ours is object-based, unoptimized, and can destroy the human species. Chimp combat is not object-based, is optimized, and cannot destroy the chimp species. But “science” ignores this differentiation. No academic has pointed to it. Find me one, any one. And yet it’s the most obvious thing in the world of violence.
But pointing out this obvious thing would mean that, if violence is eliminated, language would be eliminated, and their institutions would fall first. Again they might not know this on a rational level, but they must have a feeling that it’s true, otherwise they’d say what human violence actually is. The circuitry of human thought produces interesting phenomena like this.
Object-based combat (OBC) is the thing that humans do, and no other species does. But since OBC can be set within a linguistic institution like a fight league which can close the Merge field as soon as there’s a violation, it’s not an adequate term for describing what creates the conditions that make that field in the first place. The term should simply be “violence.” It’s an adequate word.
There’s no “animal violence,” only “animal combat.” Violence is 1) unoptimized and 2) can destroy us if we allow it. But its threat creates the potential (like a magnetic field) for grammatical language. We use this language to escape the trap of violence, which gives way to science, technology, and progress. Meanwhile violence can wrest control of these linguistic structures and use iron to destroy bronze chariots, gunpowder to destroy iron cities, and nuclear fission to destroy ammunition depots. But continued use of language domesticates us by updating the human phenotype in ways to make language easier – white palms, white sclera perhaps. This feedback system speaks volumes about how the unoptimized scenario spirals forward slowly. We can’t close this unoptomized spiral until a new pathway is generated, and I can’t imagine this will happen until language fails to stop violence. Are we there?